I bought my first original comicbook art just before the year ended – on 25th December, to be precise. Two pages from Swamp Thing, artwork by Phil Hester. From issues 148 and 162, you can still check out the pages, if you are interested, here and here. It took me quite sometime to actually pay the guy – I had totally forgotten to check whether he accepted Paypal or not. He didn’t, only cheques and money orders were acceptable, and 2fargon stepped in with a little timely help. The downside was that, instead of shipping them to me, the seller shipped them to 2fargon instead, and so it will be some time before I get to touch them. But that’s ok. I paid 73$ for both the pages, including shipping. Which, in my humble opinion, is a bargain.

I also bought myself a nice new computer table cum bookshelf, at home, and the bookshelf is now occupied by CD-cases. My books still remain packed in cartons, giving me a claustrophobic feeling everytime I enter my room. I need to do something about that, in all likelihood I’ll end up buying a steel wardrobe, to keep some of the books in.

If you are a fan of historical fiction, or Indian fiction, or good fiction, for that matter, you ought to check out Cuckold by Kiran Nagarkar. It’s been quite sometime since an Indian writer made for a white-heat read, without any of the fussy Indian-linguistic-term-dropping that comes with writing about the past and Indian characters of the past. ( yes, AKB, I am talking about you. ) Nagarkar’s Maharaj Kumar is a character that’s going to stay with me for quite sometime, I suspect.

Also found Larry Gonick’s Cartoon Guide To Sex at Bookworm a couple of weeks ago, which I promptly finished on the bus back to Hyderabad. Excellent balance of humour and information.

My trip to Guwahati revolved around two things ( other than the quiz, that is). Portishead and Wicked. Portishead, of course, being the Bristol trip-hop band who I had listened to only in passing, and had found the tunes quite the right mix of Bjork and Massive Attack. I took an mp3 CD that had all of Air and two albums by Portishead on it, and I spent three days listening to ‘Dummy’ over and over again. Beth Gibbons – *sigh*.

Wicked: The Life and Times of The Wicked Witch of the West is the kind of revisionist tale that gives me hope for the future, in times when I am bothered that I have passed that age of blissful reading that enables a reader to enjoy an Oz book, or Enid Blyton stories unconcerned with subtext. Now, I am not too much into subtext, but there is only so much that you can shut down your mental processes to. Wicked is a look at the popular Oz mythos from the point of view of the Wicked Witch Elphaba ( whose name, I figured, the author Gregory Maguire borrows from the honourable Oz-meister himself – L Frank Baum -> El Pha Ba, get it? ). A story that charts out Oz as a land oppressed by the machinations of the Wizard, a man from “our” world – and hence given to ideas that are drawn from our societal taboos. “What is evil?” – a number of characters in the book seek to ask, and try to answer that question in course of that book, and they manage to do so without sounding pretentious, or diverting me from the fact that it’s an Oz story, forgoshsakes. What amazes me is how an author manages to make a character like the Witch so sympathetic, and rewrite the familiar storyline as a series of threads, which are linked to each other in ways that make you get goosepimples towards the end.

The oddest part is, I read part of Wicked first as an audiobook, couldn’t complete it that way, and found the book the other day at MR book stall.

I also watched A Tale of Two Sisters when in Guwahati. No, it wasn’t running at a theatre there, I just took my 2-disc Tartan DVD with me, heh.

And oh, before you ask, the quiz went well. Questions got answered left, right and centre, and it was finally won by an army major from Chennai ( and he called himself, very appropriately, One-Man Army) who had a train to catch at night and popped over at Assam Engineering College when he saw the poster for the quiz right on the way to the city, just to check out how the quiz would be.