Category Archives: Books

Books

Ocean, Lane

The strangest thing happens when I try talking about something I like instantaneously. It feels like I need to rein myself in, and let cold analysis get the better of frantic hyperbole.There is the feeling that one must not judge anything in the heat of the moment. That this heady thrill that comes over you when you dive into something new is something that you had been looking forward to and are therefore bound to like. It is only later, when the ripples quieten and the delicious warmth of the water fades into a gentle familiarity, it is then that you can splash around a little more, and make up your mind if the water is really fine or not.

But sometimes. Sometimes there are exceptions.

Ocean at the End of the Lane - UK version        Ocean at the End of the Lane

 

I don’t want to talk too much about the book and what it is about. It is short – I finished it in a 2-hour sitting.  It is a sort-of memoir and not-a-sort-of memoir – in the sense that it is told in the first person, and that Neil Gaiman admittedly based a lot of the book’s seven-year-old narrator (and his grown-up version) on himself.  It has cats, three of them, and it has characters that have appeared in other Gaiman works in different incarnations. It is fantasy and not-fantasy, and it is equally sad and not-sad. It has some excellent descriptions of food, and a 2-sentence sex scene that will freeze your brain in more ways than one. Oh, and it has lines like this:

Grown-ups don’t look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they are big and thoughtless and they always know what they’re doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren’t any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.

and descriptions like this:

She took the dead fish out of the net and examined it. It was still soft, not stiff, and it flopped in her hand. I had never seen so many colors: it was silver, yes, but beneath the silver was blue and green and purple and each scale was tipped with black.

It is hard for me to read Gaiman without being nudged mentally towards familiar themes and settings from his earlier works. That is not a bad thing, because it shows how well-established the writer’s style is, but it serves me badly because sometimes the pieces just don’t fit in my mind. Like Gaiman writing Jack Kirby characters, or the last Batman story, which felt like trying to eat my mother’s chicken curry, but with sugar added. (This has not technically happened, but I am fairly sure I have dreamed of this, and have woken up sweating and trembling. Dreams, food – this book has me by the balls)

The closest Gaiman artifact that Ocean at the End of the Lane brought to my mind, however, was a short story that he wrote for a Michael Moorcock tribute book. And his blog posts, some of which talk about significant events in his life. There is a funeral in the book, and one wonders if it was that funeral, and there are oblique references and tonnes of symbolism that has me trying to take two and two and come up with two hundred forty two. Even the cover designs (of the UK and US versions) makes beautiful sense once you have read the book. It is very different from the rest of the writer’s body of work.

All I am saying is: come on in, the water’s just perfect.

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Books

Forest

Sonny Chiba is Hattori Hanzo

One of my All Time Top Five movies, Kill Bill, has this monologue by Sonny Chiba, playing retired swordsmith Hattori Hanzo.

Revenge is never a straight line. It’s a forest. And like a forest it’s easy to lose your way…to get lost… to forget where you came in.

This leads me to make two specific observations about myself and my life.

One: I find it very hard to respond to the question “what kind of books/movies/music do you like?” It is hard because I have never been able to figure out why I choose that particular book to read next, or this movie playing in theaters gets my pulse racing while I am cold towards another, possibly equally-good film. Or steadfastly refuse to listen to some albums until … I don’t know … I feel like it.

Warning: this may sound pretentious and somewhat obvious. It’s like I am in this forest full of trees blooming with psychedelic flowers and populated by mysterious creatures, and I am trying to find my own way through. I forget why I came in, what I am doing in that forest, and where I am going, but it just works out that way. I like it. I guess that’s all that matters. I am reading two books now – Do Gentlemen Really Prefer Blondes, a title that sounds too frivolous than what it is, a bunch of scientific observations about sex, human nature, relationships and biology. Questions like “how do your parents’ age determine what kind of partner you will be attracted to?” and “Why are blue-eyed men attracted to women of the same eye-color?” are answered seriously, with a dash of statistics and an odd tongue-in-cheek comment every now and then. It does get repetitive sometimes, but it’s fun. Why am I reading this book? Because I went inside Piccolo – the second-hand bookstore opposite my office – last week and paid attention to my favorite shelf (yes, I have a favorite shelf there, it displays the weirdest books, especially hidden behind others, most of a dubious nature. I found David Carradine’s Kill Bill memoir there too, which led me to watch the movie again, and ergo, the quote above – a nice game of connect-the-dots, don’t you think? Oh, and all books at Piccolo are a dollar each.) This book was hidden behind one on steamboats, and it took me a few seconds to flip through it and realize that it was going to be read next, even though I was pretty darn sure that morning about beginning to read David Byrne’s How Music Works, on my e-reader.

Then yesterday, I attended a Suzanne Vega concert, my first concert of the year, and I reached one song too late. Which in my book was okay-late, not omg-late, I took a minute or two to park the car and walked inside the venue a little faster than I usually would have, because there was nobody standing outside. I still do not know what the first song was, but ‘Pale Blue Thing’ was playing when I got in, and ‘Caramel’ began next, which turned my knees into jelly and made me forget that I had driven 600+ miles in the last 36 hours. When we were nursing our teas in the foyer of the building during the break, I not-so-unpredictably found myself next to the merchandise table, and my wallet not-so-unpredictably unloaded its contents in the general direction of the cheerful volunteers there, especially when the magic words “signing” was mentioned. Among what I got was The Passionate Eye: The Collected Writings of Suzanne Vega, and today, when waiting for code to compile and run, I opened it up. Boom, next book on the reading-immediately pile. Did I know about this book’s existence a day ago? No. Is poetry/essay/interview collections my thing? Not unless it’s – y’know – Suzanne Vega.

Umm yeah, so my reading habits are sort of a forest too. A Totoro forest, not a Baba Yaga forest. Ok, maybe a Baba Yaga forest where Hellboy and Price Ivan team up.

Two: I really really like revenge as a sub-genre. This probably dates back to my appreciation and love for The Count of Monte Cristo, which I have talked about in the past. But it is amazing how many of the films I run to watch at the theater without a second thought, or rewatch any day have this as the theme. Think about your favorite revenge flicks. Chances are very high I will have watched them, and liked them, and that I will like you for having liked them.

(For the record, Taken 2 is a terrible movie.)

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Books

A Day of Complete RetailFail

My days of throwing money at shiny things are in the past. I rarely frequent bookshops, once upon a time a source of wallet-loosening. Now I find them mostly a waste of time, or an excuse to go look at new items that have escaped my attention. I stay away from eBay, and my ComicArtFans gallery gathers dust even as I find new excuses not to buy new art.

So yesterday was terrible.

It began in the morning, when I woke up debating with myself about whether I should really try to get one of the Mondo Looper posters that were due to go for sale in a few hours. Unable to decide, I reached office early anyway, where I spent a few minutes with my boss in the kitchen, as he made fun of me for getting in at that (by my standards) ungodly hour. At 8:55, my alarm rang, and I hurried to the Mondo website. Made it in time for Dredd and Looper posters to show up, added them to  my cart, and was about to pay for them when….

  

…I closed my browser. Took a deep breath. Waited a minute, and then went back to work. I mean, seriously, I was going to drop $50 on the poster of a movie that I hadn’t even seen. Would it be one of my top 5 movies? Hell no! Would it be my favorite movie of the year? Uh huh. So there, I saved myself $50, and I felt proud of myself.

But then I began thinking about what were my top 5 movies, and wondered how many of them did have Mondo posters. There was Tyler Stout’s Kill Bill poster, which always struck me as a little too busy, too cluttered for my eyes. But it still had the nice grindhouse vibe to it. Too bad it was selling for upwards for 450$. Not my cup of tea at the moment. Then I remembered the Totoro poster, the one that got away. I was in Romania when the Mondo guys made the drop, sipping on a cup of rooibos and diligently clicking refresh on the page every few minutes. I was determined to own that print at the cost price. But a colleague Skyped me about something important, and I headed out to respond to her without having to type a lot. I come back a minute later, and it was all over. My rooibos was not even cold, it was over that quick.

So I looked around a bit at the forums I hang out, and saw a bunch of Totoro prints for sale, at prices that lay somewhere between astronomical and batshit-insane. There was however a panic sale going on, and being the kind of ruthless low-baller that totally takes advantage of panicky merchants, I shot off a PM, asking him if he would accept my low-ball offer (which, come to think of it, was not that low-ball. It was the six-month average selling price for the piece. Thereabouts. Give or take a few tenners. Mostly take.) As it turns out, he did accept my offer, and I realized, with a silly grin on my face, that I had actually gotten one of my top 5 movies up on the wall of my future apartment. A definite improvement over Looper, I would say.

Then I sipped my coffee and flipped through my Facebook feeds, where an update about GTO: The Early Years made me pause. Apparently it was getting over with volume 15, out very soon indeed. Which made no sense, because I had always thought it was a 31-volume series. Hasty realization: the US reprints were oversized, covering two volumes’ worth of material in one. No wonder. This meant that I needed to get up to speed with the adventures of Onizuka before he became Onegai Sensei Onizuka as soon as I could. Not an easy task considering that the series had two publishers, one of whom went bankrupt and all its catalogue went out of print – that was Tokyopop, for those who came in late, who had brought 10 volumes of the series out last decade. Volume 8, in particular, was selling for 50$ and above in the secondary market. The others could be obtained second-hand, off Amazon sellers or eBay. Vertical publishing was coming out with the last 5 volumes of the series.

On an impulse, I looked up eBay, and hit a 20$ best-offer on a set of the first 4 volumes. The seller accepted within 5 minutes, and as soon as I completed payment, he changed status to “shipped”. That was…quick. The package got here 3 hours ago. Probably the fastest eBay shipping EVER.

At this point, I was done with my shopping for the month. I should not have opened the email from bargaingraphicnovels that said “IDW Sale”. I should have deleted it without even opening the dang thing. But I did, and seeing the 70% discount on books that I had always wanted weakened my soul. The final pass, after much culling of the shopping cart, involved the complete Wormwood: Gentleman Corpse hardcovers by Ben Templesmith (I mean, at $7 each? Why not?) and The Cape hardcover by Joe Hill, Jason Ciaramella and Zach Howard. That will get signed at the next Wondercon, for sure. It felt a little better when pal Pablo agreed with me at the sinful nature of the discounts, and joined in the revelry.

You thought that was it? That was not it. In the evening, I was reading Oishinbo, and was thinking about how much fun it would be to read something like Eden, which was out of print too. Impulse check on eBay, seller with a full run at a deep-discount price, and also selling Sho Fumimura and Ryoichi Ikegami’s Sanctuary, another must-have. I stopped thinking. At that point, I felt unclean already. I closed my eyes, thought about lust and self-control and the need to avoid eBay for a couple of months. And then I opened my eyes and bought both the lots. Because sometimes, the retail-gods win. They win hard.

Update: 24 volumes of Gantz for 175$. At 7.1$ per volume, with free shipping? Going for it.

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Books, Myself

The Great Book Transfer

I sold a lot of books before I moved to LA. A ton of reference books, lots of comics that I knew I would be able to buy again or owned multiple copies of, a bunch of books I was pretty sure I won’t read again. There was also a year of minimal book-buying – I think I bought about 5 or 6 books in 2010, just because it was getting out of hand.

It took about a year to move my books here. I was undecided about whether I should cart them off to my parents’ or my sister’s place. Chandru, over in Chennai, offered to put them in cold storage in a room at the office, but I wasn’t sure how I would get them over. A lot of people had conflicting opinions to offer about moving stuff to the US. Some said books in bulk were not allowed to be imported, others reported packages being returned to India after months of sitting in customs. I spoke with second-hand book sellers – none of them had experience taking books into the US, just exporting them out of the States. Thankfully, pal Ajanta had no problems babysitting the books, but time was running out – even she was to move out by end of the year.

I am not sure how I stumbled onto the R2I forums, but that got things moving. Based on the positive experiences people had with movers in some sticky threads, I emailed a couple of the names mentioned there. 21st Century Relocations, based out of New York was the first to respond, and their responses left me pretty confident that they would do a good job. They went to the apartment one weekend, sent me a reasonable quotation and a week later, packing was complete. I did not even have to mail a check, just sending a scan was enough. Had to printout, sign and scan in a boatload of documents, but they did all the running-around for customs clearance. Things got a little complicated because my departure ticket to LA was not a direct flight – I had to stop at Romania for a month, and my ticket was through Delhi, while the books were in Bangalore.

But it all went well, and by end of November, the books were enroute.

They arrived end of January, in a truck whose size made me very nervous about whether all the books would fit in the apartment. But fit they did, though my room looked like a cardboard hurricane hit it.

I had a Minor Adventure while buying bookshelves from Ikea, where the gentlemen with the pick-up truck decided to hijack my items and go make three other deliveries on the way. With me in the truck too, of course. And then proceeded to give me a ride to a movie theater, with a convoluted 20 mile side-track. It was a weird day.

In the course of the week, shelves were assembled, cartons were unpacked, muffled curses echoed through my chambers. It’s not an easy task, arranging 70-odd packages of books on your own, but I managed. Strangely, I managed not to get distracted by the books I hadn’t seen in a year. Though I confess I felt complete when I arranged the Walter Moers volumes on the top shelf, and smiled at the Tom Sharpe collection, putting them aside to reread Riotous Assembly and Indecent Exposure. Srividya Natarajan’s No Onions Nor Garlic joined the maybe-I-will-read-soon pile, as did the Lee Siegel books. Some left me rolling my eyes – what on earth was I thinking when I bought the Clarke Gable biography (called Long Live the King) or the book on Obie award-winning plays. Or the piles of Star Wars novels. Oh well, at least 2004-version of me must have been a happy camper.

And it was done. Almost. The comics and manga were in my room, and the books went to the living room. The DVDs (the manageable pile of originals that I had the nerve to get into the States, the rest being disposed off quite some time ago) were still packed (2 boxes), and about 4 more boxes of comics remained still – I had run out of shelf-space. There was no way I was going back to Ikea any time soon, and so these boxes remained unpacked for a few weeks, affecting my zen calm every time I entered my room. Last weekend, I figured I had had enough – went to Target, bought a non-Ikea shelf and finally, finally, it was done. My preciouses were home! मेरा पिया घर आया! やった!

And now, presenting a bunch of pictures. Whee!

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Books, Weirdness

Don’t Date A Reader

Don’t date a man who reads. Don’t date a man who spends more on books than on things that matter. Don’t be with someone who lives in an apartment filled with a mountain of paperbacks and hardcovers, out-of-date New Yorker and Economist magazines, the contents of which he may have glanced through the day he bought them and then stacked them up against the wall just to show that he made an effort. Don’t go out with someone who’d rather carry a book than a gym bag. He probably does not exercise, eats unhealthy and will have a heart attack at 40.

Don’t date a man who keeps going on and on about books and poems, essays and reviews. The kind of man who is so excited about the Murakami that he finished last night that he just has to tell you all about it, in detail, even though you are running late for lunch. He will casually ask you about the last thing you have read, and if you fumble, or mention a name that is too pedestrian, he will judge you for it. If you show the slightest spark of interest in his reading, he will proceed to thrust his enthusiasm on you. You may find it amusing at first, maybe even a little sexy, but it soon gets tiresome. Every conversation will become an endless thrust-and-parry of words; any casual comment you make will result in a barbed riposte.

It’s easy to notice – and avoid – someone who reads. He’ll be the one slinking through a bookstore looking for a title someone mentioned on an obscure literary website. He does not need to buy another copy of that Neil Gaiman book just because it is the Author’s Preferred Text and has five thousand extra words, but he will. The kind of man who grins like an idiot when he comes across a first edition of The Dark Tower or a dog-eared, scotch-taped copy of Catcher in the Rye, just because that he can brag about it to his friends later. If you date a man like that (and I really suggest you don’t), be prepared to smile and nod when he tells you (for the twenty-ninth time) about how he met Jonathan Franzen in a Trader Joe’s parking lot. But try talking to him about something remotely to do with life, or your feelings, or the last episode of The Big Bang Theory that you enjoyed, and he will probably not know how to react. Or tell you that he never liked that series anyway.

Don’t date a man who reads. He is the kind of man who says he has a busy social calendar, but chooses to sit in his room and alphabetically index his collection instead. He can’t pass a bookstore without popping in “just to see”, but complains about waiting for you for fifteen minutes outside the changing room of the department store because his precious reading time is ticking away. He spends hundreds of dollars on eBay buying full runs of Louis L’Amour novels, but wears the same pair of sneakers everywhere because he cannot spare the extra money to get himself a good pair of shoes. Don’t date a man who, on your birthday (if he remembers your birthday), buys you another book that you will never read. Who thinks flowers are impractical and environment-unfriendly, but continues to buy paperbacks because e-readers “don’t smell right”.

Don’t date a man who reads fiction. He thinks that life is a fairy tale, and that happy endings exist, and that every story needs a villain. He sees the world in black and white and avoids the grays. He has a smart, ironic comeback every time he messes up, as if his wrong-doing can be washed away with puerile, second-hand wit. He will consider himself more knowledgeable than your friends; he scoffs at their conversation because he thinks they are shallow. He will go to the movies with you, but rolls his eyes at the parts you enjoy, because they are not faithful to the book. He will accompany you to parties, but refuse to wear anything but Threadless t-shirts because he feels dressing up destroys his individuality.

Don’t date a man who reads. He’ll keep the bedside lamp on till 2 in the morning to finish the last chapter of the book he’s reading. Chances are high that he will sigh loudly when he’s done, just to make sure you wake up uneasily and ask him if everything is all right. Don’t date a man who will refuse to go out on a sunny day, choosing instead to loll in bed and reread his Wodehouse. If you lie with him, he will scratch your head distractedly. If you try to cuddle, he will push you away and ask you to make him a coffee. He will say please, but as an afterthought, and only because Mr.Darcy would have. Yes, the sex will be interesting, but only because he is thinking of Henry Miller and Nabokov.

You don’t deserve a man who thinks he is a Victorian hero come to life, who pretends he can take care of everything but cannot fix a leaking tap, whose  has his head in the clouds and up his ass. You don’t deserve a man whose room smells of musty paper and printer’s ink. You definitely do not deserve a man who refuses to get a TV connection because he cannot stand commercials. You don’t want to be with someone who cannot stand on a beach and watch the moon rise without quoting Shakespeare. A man who can recite Tennyson by heart, but does not know the names of his neighbors. A man who always – always – wants to get the last word in.

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