Angst In My Pangst

After a very, very long time, I made my way to a second-hand bookshop this Saturday. There was an open quiz held that afternoon at the Hari Hara Kala Bhavan, commemorating the first anniversary of the Hyderabad Quiz Club, and Arul and I, after having sat through the preliminaries, thought about hitting the bookshop nearest the auditorium. Which was the relatively-new place adjacent to Sangeet Theatre. On the way, I remembered that the theatre was no more ( it is being renovated into a multiplex), would the bookstore still be there? Unfounded fears, because the place was open. And pretty dark, because of the scheduled power-cuts in the area in the evening. Nevertheless, we valiantly scoured through the piles. And I discovered a Cornelia Funke book I had been looking for ( The Thief Lord, 50 Rs) and a rock-and-roll novel I had heard of – Powder, by Kevin Sampson. Saw a three-volume Michael Moorcock collection that had Behold The Man and two other novels ( Breakfast in the Ruins and The Final Programme). Didn’t pick it up because I already had the first book, and right now I am supposed to be on a book-buying sabbatical. No, really.

The Find of the Day came when we approached the billing counter. There is was – Eiji Yoshikawa’s Musashi, a 970-page behemoth commonly called “the Gone with the Wind of Japan”. It’s the story of swordsman Miyamoto Musashi, and I had been eyeing it on Amazon for quite sometime, trying to prioritize it with the other items on The Wish-list. This is the book on which the Samurai trilogy by Hiroshi Inagaki is based, as is the manga series Vagabond. I am glad I didn’t spend 23$ on it – 100 Rs is a better sum any given day. Finding the book even made up for the fact that we missed the finals of the quiz by one star ( 27 and 8 stars made it, while we got 27 and 7 stars.)

Have you seen the brilliant packaging of the Taare Zameen Par DVD? Three discs, one DVD with the feature accompanied by the director’s commentary, the other with deleted scenes and a panel discussion about disabled children, and the third a CD of the background score. The package contains two colour prints of artist Samir Mondal’s paintings for the movie, the two that form part of the film’s climax. Also comes with a flip-book ( featuring Ishaan Avasthi’s famous hand-waving sad kid drawings), a pen, and a notebook. This is the kind of dedicated DVD release that makes me want to plunk down maximum retail price and wipe tears of joy at the lavish care the film-maker has showered on something of his creation. The price for this chunk of awesomeness is 499 Rs, believe it or not.

Much of my time is being taken over by the first season of Arrested Development. There is also the first sixteen-but-one Berserk manga volumes ( which was a gift from someone spacial) that I am reading from time to time. Lots of BT and DJ Shadow on the headphones. Half-way through two fantasy books, Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart and Diana Wynne-Jones’s Chrestomanci Chronicles volume 2. The Chronicles of Chrestomanci is this fantastic multiple-book cycle dealing with parallel worlds, magic and cats. I finished volume 1 – which has Charmed Life and The Lives of Christopher Chant, the first two books – in a single sitting.Christopher Chant was written later but is the prequel to Charmed Life, and Ms Wynne-Jones makes it full of delicious revelations and foreshadowings which made me grin like a maniac all day. Taking it slow on volume 2, I have a bunch of other unread Wynne-Jones which will be up next. I am on the lookout for The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, a send-off on fantasy clichés written by her in the form of a travel guide, I think I need to increase my second-hand-bookstore-visiting frequency.