A Longish Mailbox Monday

Welcome to Mailbox Monday, a meme started by Marcia of To Be Continued.

As if to make up for lost time, books have poured into our house the last couple of weeks. First, I sorted out the postal issues that I talked about last week and received two books that I thought had got lost in the mail – Manhattan Mango by Madhuri Iyer and Bucket List of a Traveloholic by Sarika Pandit. I’ve been bitten by a bad case of the travel bug lately but current circumstances being not conducive to actual travel, I hope to travel vicariously through both these books, which came to me from Fingerprint Publishing.

Manhattan Mango is about three men who move from Mumbai to Manhattan and sounds like an Indianized version of the Friends sitcom. I don’t expect it to be high literature but it sounds interesting, and since Manhattan is a place I have on my travel bucket list, I am looking forward to reading about the city from an Indian viewpoint.

Talking about bucket lists brings me to the next book – Bucket List of a Traveloholic which is about the author Sarika Pandit’s globetrotting adventures. She seems to have visited all the places I want to go – Spain, Morocco, Greece, and much more. I envy her nomadic life.

The next book I got is Finding Arun by Marisha Pink. It’s about 19-year old Aroon Rutherford who uncovers a family secret, and I don’t know much more than that. I received this book from the publicist.

So, these were the review books that came into our house this month. However, these aren’t the only books we got.

Recently, we took advantage of the sale at The Oxford Bookstore to buy Snubnose and Piglet some new books.

Snubnose is fast becoming an avid reader and is keen to build her own library with her favorite books. While I do indulge her sometimes, I am always careful to keep in mind that she will soon outgrow these books and so I always watch out for book sales.

Like most sales go, the Oxford Book sale was no great shakes. Only a few books were marked down below 50% off and those were so badly defaced that I wouldn’t take them even if they were free. The general markdowns were only around 10-20%.

In spite of it all, we managed to find some decent deals.

Here’s what we got

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[item title=”For the Snubnose“]

• James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Ugly Truth by Jeff Kinney
• A couple of non-fiction titles – A book on writing better and one music book

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[item title=”For the Piglet“]

• A Great Day for Pup by Dr.Seuss
• The Shape of Me and Other Stuff by Dr.Seuss
• A Rapunzel sticker book

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Snubnose and Piglet actually had much larger shopping baskets and I had to coax, plead, and in an extreme case (Piglet had also included a remote control car in his basket) hide stuff to convince them to edit their bags.

Snubnose’s book choices were fairly predictable. She immediately went for the Roald Dahl and Junie B.Jones books. I had to really convince her that as these books were easily available in the library, she should look out for something different. It was a hard-sell but after some negotiations, two Roald Dahl books and the Junie B.Jones books were left behind on the counter without too many tears being shed.

Piglet was a surprise. I wasn’t really expecting him to choose stuff on his own, but when he saw Snubnose browsing, he immediately started doing the same. He recognized the famous picture of the cat in the hat and since he loves those books, he promptly heaped the whole lot into his basket.

Oh, Piglet. He was so serious and so intent on his shopping, he didn’t even realize he was putting multiple versions of the same book into his basket.

The Rapunzel sticker book was also his choice. It seems an odd choice for a boy but he loves listening to me read out fairy-tale stories from Snubnose’s old books – Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Piglet just laps them all up.

I don’t know how much he understands these stories, but when the books end with the hero and heroine getting married and living happily ever after, Piglet has the hugest happiest smile on his face. He is a romantic at heart, I think!

And did I get anything for myself? Sadly I didn’t 🙁 . The discounts just weren’t steep enough. I was tempted by a lovely hardcover of The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton but a 10% discount was too paltry. For that discount I may as well pick a less thumbed over book for full-price.

Whew! This post turned out much longer than I originally intended. Time to put a hard stop to my ramblings.

What books did you get last week?