Over the past five years I've been amassing an eclectic collection of cheap used books on my trips to Bombay. At Rs.10 apiece (around $0.25 US) they aren't expensive or significant (most of them are, in fact, the very opposite), but they are valuable to me, insomuch as they are weird -- and I love weird. I have read very few of them; Of the hundreds (and by now, thousands), I have only finished a handful. There have been plans ever since I started blogging to talk about them, to read and review them, but this has so far not happened.

I was reminded of this recently when Dan blogged about his bookshelf, and in the comments I lamented that most of my books were in boxes (he suggested I just take a picture of the box). "That's it," I said to myself, "enough dawdling!" I looked through a small box of them and chose seven -- none of which I have read -- but which I think are interesting. Maybe this will give me the impetus to actually read some, but for now I will talk of their weird and wonderful subjects, their pretty and often breathtaking covers, and their all-round coolness. I hope you find them as fun as I do.

You see some strange things at the mall. Most of the time it has to do with fashion accidents and, in the case of Dubai, kiosks selling ridiculous looking real estate, but once in a while you spot something you'd swear came out of a Katsuhito Ishii movie.

Take this guy, for example. Fairly normal looking white guy: shirt, loose trousers, glazed-over, pre-weekend look in his eyes, bag of shopping and... fluffy bathroom slippers?

I hope it was some kind of subversive fashion statement, but chances are that either his pair of snakeskin moccasins were off at the cleaners, or he was just too stoned to know what he had on.

V