Category Archives: Books

Books, Weirdness

The End is Nigh

This really happened. With minor variations.

*  *

“I heard you were leaving the hermitage, Bahu.”

“Yes, I am, Anant. I will miss you, and you too, Ugra, and all our friends, but I have had it. I cannot take our teacher’s stupidity anymore.”

“Bahu, that is harsh! Our teacher’s methods are strange, but he means well, you know it.”

“He means well? Is that why you are making excuses for him, Ugra? Instead of teaching us the sacred verses just as his teacher taught him, and his teacher’s teacher taught him, he wants to try out these barbaric methods on us. Writing? Are we stupid that we cannot remember what we recite in the mornings? Did my father scribble symbols on barks of trees instead of committing all the sacred verses to memory? I do not like being taken for a fool, Ugra, and I would rather leave this school and join another, instead of submitting to this madness.”

“Bahu, our teacher has valid points. The merchants that travel here beyond the seas, they write everything on stone tablets. Their knowledge is timeless, it cannot be changed by forgetting a word here and there. And besides, think of the time it would save if we could just read and refer to what we had written the day before, or last week, or a year ago, instead of trying to remember every single thing we have learnt over the years.”

“That is the way it always has been, Anant. All these foreign traditions, we accept them blindly without understanding the long-term effects. I, for one, do not want my children to recall Vedas by reading them. They should know the sacred chants by heart, Anant, just as we do. Besides, these pieces of bark, they stink of sap and dampness. How can you even bear to be near them? They make my skin crawl.”

* * *

“Have you seen this monstrosity, Simplicio?”

“Ah yes, the German and his madness. I cannot believe the Holy Father allowed such a thing to exist.”

“Look at the thing. Look at it. So disposable. So…so common. Vulgar beyond belief. Can you imagine someone wanting to possess something like this? Put something like this up for display, in their homes? I would rather spit on something like this than want to own it.”

“Sagredo, have you seen the codexes in the Malatestiana? Such perfect little wonders. How can something produced this way recapture the beauty of a hand-written parchment?”

“And the smell, Simplicio. Smell it. This reeks of machinery. No aesthetics, no personality.”

“I hear it’s become fashionable to own them nowadays. Last I heard, Salviati was thinking of getting one too. Ho, Salviati, there you are! Come here, will you?”

“Simplicio, Sagredo, what up, bitches? Oh. OH. Is that what I think it is?”

“Yes, my uncle got one yesterday, I took it from him just to see what the fuss was all about. As far as I can see, it’s hardly the wonder it’s made out to be. I hear you’re getting one too?”

“I am. Oh yes, I am. I pick mine up in a few days. Thirty florins well spent. Quite the demand right now, especially among the nobility, but I know someone who knows someone. And a copy’s been reserved for me. ”

“A tedious fad, Salviati. You will soon realize that you threw your money away, money you could have spent on a real book.”

“No, you don’t get it, you guys, this is the future. Not your tedious parchments. This will bring knowledge to the masses, mark my words. This changes everything.”

“Sure, sure. Well, you and the teeming masses can keep your Gutenberg Bibles, Salviati. We’re off to the Malatestiana, and then to the Abbey. That is how books are meant to be read, in the company of like-minded people. People who know how to reproduce books, who understand the toil involved in creating a copy that captures their personality. Books are meant to be special, Salviati, not mass-produced like clothes..or…or furniture.  But it’s tiresome having to explain it to you print-enthusiasts and your ‘democratization of knowledge’ spiel. Mark my words, print will never catch on.”

* * *

Dear e-reader/iPad/Kindle-haters,

“Real books smell so good” is not an argument.

Cheers,

Me.

Standard
Books

Pop Culture Update: Books

I haven’t really been writing much about things that matter, like books and comics and things that make me want to run around my room shrieking with happiness. This post tries to fill that gaping void in your life.

There are a lot of shitty fantasy trilogies around, but Hunger Games is not one of them. The books were recommended to me by a librarian who sat next to me at a Neil Gaiman show. The movie trailer came out a little while ago, and no doubt I would have dismissed it as another of those post-Twilight teen-angst bubbles. But hey, librarian-recommendation. So I read book 1, and was blown away, and finished books 2 and 3 the same week. It’s hard to read when you’re on vacation, but these were just that good.

What’s the series about? If you’ve read/watched Battle Royale or The Running Man and The Long Walk by Stephen King, you will understand that Suzanne Collins takes familiar tropes, at least in the first book, and then takes those to their logical conclusion in the sequels. The protagonist is a girl that plays with metaphorical fire, and kicks up a political hornet’s nest of epic proportions. The cast of characters features a gruff Mentor-figure, a star-crossed relationship , a Diabolical Villain (who does not even make a proper appearance until the beginning of the second book – well-played there, Ms Collins), a Faithful Confidante, and surprisingly, the most awesome Fictional Fashion Designer you’ve ever seen. The three books work beautifully well together, and I loved the way how the storyline unraveled the world’s back-story slowly, the characters acquiring voices of their own. The books brought me on the brink of tears multiple times, and made me skip a healthy regime of sleep just so that I get my pulse-rate back to normal.

I read Max Brooks’ World War Z: An Oral History Of The Zombie War on a recent flight. Had heard good things about the book on Joe Hill’s Twitter Geek list, even though I had known of Brooks as a parody guy. Expectations were low – how much more can this whole zombie fad be milked anyway? Turns out it can, and wonderfully at that.

Brooks looks at the zombie outbreak as an actual worldwide event and examines its sociopolitical implications. He presents it like a documentary-style set of interviews with survivors, soldiers, politicians, inventors, people from all over the world – much unlike traditional zombie media, where the focus is on a small band of individuals. The interviews lay out the timeline of the “war”, from the time the zombie outbreak caused society to break down, the slow and eventual return to some form of normalcy, and finally, the climactic showdown. In the process, it covers how every aspect of society is changed as a result – from racism to film-making, military strategy to everyday slang, how certain countries take the lead in containing the social meltdown, and how society mutates to keep up. The interviews lead into one another, jumping across continents, showing just how random events on one side of the globe affect other countries.

The book has tonnes of disturbing moments – a traumatized young girl’s account of a zombie attack, political shenanigans that lead to loss of lives, a zombie vaccine that turns out to be a marketing placebo, the build-up to nuclear war between unlikely enemies. And it has moments of stunning epicness – I refer to them as F!$* Yeah Moments. The Japan arc, for example, blindsides you completely, with two unlikely “protagonists” undergoing their own trials against the zombies. Pay close attention to the real-world nudge in the South Africa arc – where a plan concocted during the apartheid years to contain race mobs is resurrected to contain the zombie attack.

The movie is in production right now, but with stars like Brad Pitt attached to the movie, I have a feeling that the everyday aspect of the book will be abandoned in the favor of focusing on specific individuals. This book offers the refreshing view that human society as a whole can be heroic, somehow I do not see Hollywood subscribing to that utopian ideal. Oh well.

Standard
Books

Naked Fat Book Rave: John Scalzi – the Old Man’s War series

I have not really followed much SF in the last few years, with the exception of writers I already follow thanks to their comicbook credentials. But Scalzi’s name kept popping up in different contexts – the most notable of them being Joe Hill’s Twitter feed. There’s only so much name-dropping one can take before caving in, and I began reading Old Man’s War with slightly more-than-average expectations.

Oh. My. God.

Scalzi can write. No, scratch that, Scalzi can turn reader-ly expectations on their head, craft an engaging story and make me root for his characters. And within 20-odd pages, I had gone from Bruce-Banner-wimpy-reader to Hulk-flip-pages-so-quick-they-combust mode. And that hasn’t happened in quite some time. He unravels the world slowly, peeling away layers one at a time. The kind of smart storytelling that builds on familiar sci-fi tropes, is unafraid to go off the beaten track, and sneak in smug little homages – I cannot believe he name-called Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean in the same line! And yeah, he definitely has a wicked sense of humor.

Basic premise – humans are at war. With everyone in the universe. Space colonization is being spearheaded by the Colonial Defence Forces, with senior citizens as military recruits and third-world countries as colonizers. The first book introduces us to John Perry and his first few years in the CDF, as he takes on alien races, all with different agendas. A lot of well-crafted action sequences. Sex when you least expect it. Shout-outs to other sci-fi concepts and works. Be warned – comparisons to Robert Heinlein’s works of military fiction are inevitable, Scalzi goes one up and mentions Starship Troopers himself, in the second book.

There’s a point in the book where everything goes to hell, and that’s when we’re introduced to the second lead character of the series. No details, but the sequel follows this character, so you will understand. By the beginning of the third book, we’ve moved decades since we first encountered Perry, and it’s thrilling to see how Scalzi manages to weave threads and plot-points so fucking elegantly. I just started Book 3 this morning , and I know there’s a fourth book, the title of which tells me that a particular character is just as important as I thought.

Also, Scalzi seems to be the first non-Indian scifi writer who uses authentic Indian names. Face it, it’s grating to hear names like ‘Muralidharan Singh’ or ‘Hussein Kumar’, where writers mash together names without knowing much about ethnicity or religion. So when you come across names like ‘Utpal Chowdhury’, ‘Rohit Kulkarni’ and ‘Savitri Guntupalli’, and even a goat named ‘Prabhat’, you doff your imaginary topi at the writer, and carry on reading, with even more respect for his world-building skills. It’s always the small things.

Highly, highly recommended. Even more so because when I think about it, these books are unfilmable. You’ll know why when you read them.

Standard
Books, Gaming

Extra Lives

The last book I read in 2010 was Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives, a personal examination of video games, their limitations, and how they’re on their way to becoming a medium full of possibilities. It’s by no means complete – as the author himself notes, quite a lot of games were not covered even though he had written about them (including Half-Life 2, goddamnit, one of my favorite games), and all of them were X-Box 360 games, because that is what Bissell owned. It’s a fast, breezy read – I was done with all but the last chapter on my flight to Guwahati. The last chapter was called Grand Thefts, and I deferred the pleasure because I thought I would come home, install GTA4 on this laptop and continue my saved game. Alas, I had forgotten to take a backup of the saves, and I did not have the enthusiasm to start over on Niko Belic’s quest.

I did finish the book just before the 31st – and I have to say that Grand Thefts was a great chapter to end the book on, because it adds a different layer to the addictive nature of video games, in particular the open-world kind that GTA4 is an example of, the kind that demands hours and hours of dedication and world-grinding. You see, Bissell hooked up with a coke dealer, got high snorting lines of cocaine, and then played GTA4 continuously. It’s the kind of thing that would make me giggle nervously. When Bissell says “Video games and cocaine feed on my impulsiveness, reinforce my love of solitude and make me good and bad in equal measure”, I pause and wonder if that’s the same reason I play video games myself, and if I should try and see what it feels like to get high and play GTA. Hmm.

The best thing about the book, I thought, was the objective look at the shortcomings of the medium, despite the semi-memoir approach. For example, Bissell thinks the world of Bioshock, but he devotes quite a bit of page-time to a discussion of Ubisoft designer Clint Hocking’s evisceration of the game in a much-discussed blog post. Even as he professes his love for games like Resident Evil, Fallout 3 and Oblivion, he laments the cringe-worthy dialogue that populates most such games (Mass Effect earns quite a bit of praise, on the other hand). The anecdotes that Bissell scatters around the book are little snapshots of gamer lore – every gaming geek worth his headshot has fond memories of game sequences and the author is no exception.  My favorite is his account of a co-op session of the zombie game Left 4 Dead, a tale of heroism, courage and occasional douchebaggery – even though I personally have never played co-op. All of these makes Extra Lives a wonderful look at the American gaming scene from the point of view of a neutral observer – but one who is sold at the medium’s possibilities, and is optimistic about the future of gaming and game culture.

The downside of the book is what he does not cover. In addition to the seminal contemporary games that were missed out, there could have been chapters on handheld gaming, on the Japanese influence (Resident Evil, Kojima and Metal Gear Solid are brought up in passing, but c’mon, you really do not want to skim over such cornerstones of gamelore), sports games, casual games (including the influence of the Wii). BUT.  Extra Lives introduced me to the awesomeness of Braid, and for that, I’ll be eternally grateful.

Like all successful pop culture artifacts, this book requires a sequel. Possibly a franchise, that tracks the gaming industry as it marches towards world domination.

Standard
Books, Life, Weirdness

Book Fair Adventures Part 2

It amuses me to think of how many, and how very strange memories I have of the Guwahati Book Fair.

This happened when I was in the ninth standard. It was the last two days of that year’s fair, and a bunch of us friends decided to meet up in the afternoon, go to a resort and do some go-karting, head to a pub, get smashed and find ourselves a bunch of girls to hang out with. Well no, it was fucking 1994 and there was no go-karting in fucking Guwahati, and definitely no pubs. My city was the kind of place where, if you went to one of those dimly lit bar-cum-restaurants and ordered a drink (if you drank, that is. I didn’t.), chances were the manager would come to you and ask if you were so-and-so’s son, and  it would turn out that you were distant relatives and oh dear god you were going to be in so much trouble when you went back home. The only time we would hang around with girls was in school, where if anyone got too interested in a girl she would come and tie a rakhi on the guy. So yeah, what we planned to do  was to meet at the Book Fair, and go buy books and head home at 7:00, which is when most of Guwahati fell asleep.

What happened that fine day was something else altogether. Post-noon, I had that pleasurable flutterby feeling in my tummy that heralded the arrival of fine bibliographic pleasures on the horizon, and I distinctly remember playing ‘Koncham Nilavu’ very loud while getting ready to go. (For a very long time, ‘Koncham Nilavu’ was my default let’s-do-this-shit-yo song of choice) I headed out just at about 3 ( we were supposed to meet at 4), the perfect time to adjust for a bus delay. As I walked out the gate, there was a dog sleeping nearby – not an uncommon sight by any means, and my motto in life at that time being ‘Canis Dormiens Nunquam Tittilandus’, I sidestepped the noble animal and proceeded to my destination.

The bitch jumped up and bit me on the thigh! It wasn’t one of those Stephen King Presents Cujo-level bites with a lot of gore and ripping sounds of muscle and tissue, neither was it a playful Disney Dalmatian-level nip – the bite was just enough to make me holler. My shout made the dog let go of my thigh and growl loudly, and I did the most logical thing possible – I kicked it twice and ran back inside the house. Not forgetting to lock the gate.

I admit to being very panicky, and hoping that there was no blood. Ran to the bathroom, switched on the light, took my jeans off (remembering to thank my lucky stars I had worn jeans and not a normal pair of trousers). Nope, a little scratched skin, but no trace of blood. My Junior Red Cross training kicked into gear (most people thought the JRC was nothing much beyond singing campfire songs, ogling at girls from other schools and designing blood donation posters. I disagree) and I washed the wound thoroughly with detergent and lots of water to make sure no trace of the dog’s saliva remained. By then, my panic levels had lowered themselves to sustainable levels, and I was beginning to worry about the fact that I had lost about  fifteen minutes and I should head to the Book Fair as soon as possible. And that’s precisely what I did, remembering to take a stone along just in case the dog was around.

And I wore the same pair of jeans, of course.

By the time I got to the fair, the fear had been replaced by boisterousness . You will have to admit there is an inherent coolness to replying – “Nothing much, got bitten by a dog”, when someone asks you what’s up. My friends snickered a little, one of them was a little worried, and talked about an uncle who had been bitten by a dog and ran around the house on all fours after a year, because he did not get any shots. You needed to take shots, each aimed at a precise point around your navel, or else you would be barking mad, quite literally, in a year. “Nah, not going to happen to me”, I said. “I cleaned it thoroughly, and there was no blood.” I came back home, very pleased with myself, at about 7:30. There were a bunch of people in the living room. They looked worried. Apparently there was a rabid dog in the neighborhood that had bitten some people, and they had managed to kill it. One of the kids that were bitten was in hospital. I figured it was high time I speak up about my adventure.

It was a long night. Lots of injections ( none around the tummy, thankfully), lots of weeping ( my mom), lots of murmurs about irresponsible teenagers who do not know about their priorities, and fuck, no meat for a year. Thanks to that stupid dog, I had to change my diet, I had to remember specific dates every month to go and get more injections, go visit some temples with my parents who were convinced that there was an evil spirit at work mucking about with my karma-lines, and miss a kick-ass school picnic. And to this day, everytime I see a sleeping stray dog, I mentally prepare myself to be ready to kick and run if the beast shows the slightest intention of lunging at me.

But I bought some great books that day, so it all worked out in the end.

Standard