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Landmark, Mumbai, and a crib about bookstores

Since I’ve been flying around the country quite a bit (urm, planes, not newly developed wings), I have been able to find time to catch up on a bit of reading. And buying. Reread Gaiman’s Smoke and Mirrors on the Kanpur trip. Also started a Diana Wynne-Jones collection of short stories just after that got over. And graphic novels, loads of them.

Landmark, Mumbai was a revelation. I had been hearing raves about it from oceansandearth and suku. The former gave me a near-apoplexy by mentioning that not only did the place have Samurai Executioner volumes 8 and 9, which yours truly had been searching for high and low, it also had volumes 14 and 15 of Blade of the Immortal, of which I had read volumes 1-13 in white-heat some time ago. And indeed, when I landed up there, the collection sent a rush of blood to my head. It had all that, and much more. Is anyone looking for volumes of Akira? What about David Lloyd’s latest original GN Kickback? Complete runs of Fables TPBs, Y The Last Man, Flash Gordon collections, Promethea – basically whatever mainstream comics has to offer. Even the first two volumes of the Koike/Kojima release Path of the Assassin, which is just being released by Dark Horse.

But hold on a second, no discounts. Wankers. Just went ahead and bought some bare necessities, Samurai Executioner and BotI included. Glared at the hardcover edition of The Complete Conan by Robert E Howard. Wankers. I will just have to pick up the softcover version the next time I am in Blossom. My patience has run out.

It pains me extremely to realise that nowhere in Hyderabad can I buy new books with a 20% discount, like I used to in Bangalore. It’s partly a blessing, because most of my book-buying is now confined to second-hand books ONLY while in this city. And boy oh boy, Best-Frankfurt-MR do manage to throw up surprises every now and then, like the original Tideland novel by Mitch Cullin for just 50 Rs, and a beautiful fairy tale book called Wingless which I picked up the other day just because it has illustrations by Atanu Roy. I do frequent the bigger bookshops – Odyssey and Walden – every now and then, but that’s just to check up on the latest releases. If I like anything, I buy them at 20% discount the next time I am at Bookworm or Blossom. Both Odyssey and Walden have these “Sales” twice every year, in which they sell all their stock at a grand 10% off. Phoeey! Walden does one better. It takes out the worst books of the lot, the marketting manuals that were out of anyone’s radar eight years ago, Java 1.2 API guides, Windows 98 tutorials, and tags them with “special prices” – which we customers are supposed to drool over and buy immediately. They are selling unsold hardcover copies of Harry Potter and The Half Blood Prince at 15% off – well after the paperback has been released. Morons.

Count your blessings, Bangalore-dwellers. For all the cribs I have against your city, there are certain things that make me gnash my teeth and wish I were still in that office on Museum Road. Ah, to be able to drop in at Blossom every day at lunchtime.

Did you know that Barefoot Gen, the seminal manga on the horrors of Hiroshima, and considered to be one of the inspirations behind Grave of the Fireflies is now available in an Indian edition? Yes, and quite well-priced at 250 Rs, also comes with an introduction by Anand Patwardhan.

Marjane Satrapi’s Chicken and Plums is also available at most bookshops, though the cost price of 600 is somewhat off-putting. I will just wait for a Bangalore trip to pick it up.

Volumes 5-8 of Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha are available quite freely in the market now. ( How freely? Even a backwaters bookshop like Odyssey, Hyderabad has them on display. The last time I asked them if they had Buddha, one of the salesmen pointed me to the “religion” section. Bah! ) Prices also seem to have come down quite a bit. 295 per book, and if you buy them from places that offer a discount, you get them for REALLY cheap. I ought to be peeved that I spent almost twice the money on the first four volumes, but this lowered price makes me quite glad because more people will pick up this superb series, which deserves hosannahs and praise and our eternal gratitude to Osamu Tezuka for creating it all. Highly recommended, folks. Storytelling does not get better than this.

I tried watching Nacho Libre the other night, but fell asleep midway. Is it just me, or is Jack Black trying too hard?

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Mickey Spillane died. Damn. I used to love the guy’s work, ever since Max Allan Collins mentioned him in the letters pages of an issue of Batman and I happened to chance upon I, The Jury – incidentally the man’s first novel – in one of Guwahati’s second-hand bookshops. True to the way my life has always been, I couldn’t find any other Mickey Spillane novel anywhere until after graduation. A Sunday trip to Abids gave me 20 Mickey Spillane novels, which were being sold at the very competitive price of 10 Rs each. Some collector must have sold off his entire Spillane set at a go, because there is no human way for me to explain that haul. Went on a Spillane binge for about a month, finished 17 books one after the other, and I remember quite vividly that in my thoughts, I constructed Mike Hammer-ish sentences. Probably the only other character I can compare to Mike would be Andrew Vachss’s Burke.

Did you know that there was a Mike Hammer comic strip in the 1950’s? Ironic, considering that Spillane had originally concieved of Mike Hammer as a comicbook character named Mike Danger and was turned down by quite a few companies. After the success of the novels, the comicbookization was easier.

Spillane managed to do something no other writer has ever done – he played his the role of Mike Hammer in a 1963 movie. ( No, Stephen King as Jordy Verrill does not count) This bit of information, unfortunately, came to me after a rather gripping prelim round in the A/V quiz of an instalment of IIT Madras’s cul-fest Saarang. We missed out qualification by half points, bah. There was also a comic called Mickey Spillane’s Mike Danger published by Tekno comics ( the short-lived company that did the excellent – ah, well, in my opinion anyways – Mr Hero The Newmatic Man.) written by Max Allan Collins and featuring Mike Danger in the future. Haven’t read it, though I have seen house ads in the pages of Mr Hero.

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I saw this excellent Telugu movie this weekend. Anukokunda Oka Roju, which translates to Suddenly…One Day. Rather neat concept, and nearly flawless execution. A friend brought it up first to me, during a long walk. The premise was this – this girl, at the insistence of a close friend, goes to a party during a weekend. Someone drugs her drink, to the strains of Sunidhi Chauhan and Dominique’s I Wanna Sing ( I will talk about the music, hold on a bit), and the next morning she wakes up in her bed and finds out that she’s late for her college. Only, when she gets to classes, she finds out that there’s no one around, and the lone clerk on duty asks her why she’s come there on a Sunday. Yes. There’s a day missing from her life, and she cannot remember anything about what happened to her between the night of the party and the time she woke up in her bed.

Which is rather bad, because there are random people trying to kill her. A guy accosting her for money she owes him. A scary recording that gives an ominous portent of what might have transpired that night. And a couple of disturbing dreams.

Throw in a juice-swigging police officer who has a crush on the lady, a confused taxi driver, a gentle giant with a penchant for theatre of the mythological variety, a rather cryptic old man who stays in the same apartment complex as the lady, and a series of odd incidents that are more connected than you could ever imagine. To that, add a hilarious bunch of dialogues that are subtitled really well ( now that’s an issue I have with watching Tamil DVDs, the subtitles suck. This one had pretty good subs in comparison), MM Kreem’s peppy music, and completely down-to-earth performances by everyone concerned. You have a movie that makes me want to go and buy everything Chandrashekhar Yeleti has ever made and watch them back to back. The guy shot into prominence with his first film Aithe, which Sasi raved about for quite some time. Erm, actually, I’ve already gone and bought Aithe – the original DVD is available for a measly 99 Rs. I am eager to see it, but I doubt if I can, before the weekend. Ah well.

A note about the music. There are not too many songs, this is a thriller after all, but all of them are potential earworms. In particular, ‘Righto Lefto’ by Shreya Ghoshal – the combination of the melody and Charmy’s expressions in the film are just TOO much. The party song ‘I wanna sing’ is like a stripped-down item number, if that makes sense to you. Excellent.

Stop smirking, vrikodhara.

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I had a couple of book coupons for Walden, and redeemed them for a book called Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb by Jerry Pinto. No, this is not a modern retelling of the Illiad or anything – it’s about our favourite dancing lady of the fifties, sixties and the seventies, and it’s somewhat disappointing because the writer could not really involve the lady herself in his enterprise. I am halfway into the book, and there are no remarkable insights into Helen’s career other than the ones we already know courtesy stray Filmfare articles. What the book managed to do was to get me to listen to old cabaret numbers early in the morning, ensuring that I spend quite some time at the keyboard plonking away ‘Mera Naam Chin Chin Choo”.

And I finally got my hands on the Omkara CD last night, heard the first song, and I decided I needed some quality time to listen to the album. Fun awaits, yeehah.

* * *

And an OS crash ensured a reformat of the primary drive, followed by a Windows reinstallation. Stuff lost: saved game files, stray images, all installed programs, and, worst of all, the FL Studio files from last year, some of which I was rather proud of. Ouch.

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Beatzo’s Laws of Second-hand Book-Buying

First Law, or the law of pricing: A book will always be priced higher than what one is willing to pay for it.
Corollary I : The feeling of euphoria induced on seeing a book is inversely proportional to amount on the price tag.

Second Law, or the Scouring Law: You always find a book when you least expect it.
OR
The less the effort you put into finding a book, the greater the chances are that you will find it.
Corollary to the Second Law: If you decide to stop buying books for a limited period of time, the quantity of book sales around you will increase dramatically.

Third Law, or the Law of Boundless Optimism: A book will always be available at a cheaper price at some other place some other time.
Corollary to the Third Law: You will always meet a guy who has bought a book at a rate cheaper than what you paid for it.

Fourth Law, or the Serious Law: If you wait to buy a book you think is slightly overpriced, you will always find it on the shelf, but not on the day you give up and go to buy it.

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Ptolemy’s Gate, and the Bartimaeus Trilogy

One fine day, when browsing through the old books in one of the bookstores near Anuradha Theatre, Guwahati, I came across the novelisation of The Thief of Baghdad, the movie starring Errol Flynn and released sometime before the fifties. The only Thief of Baghdad I knew then was the Shatrughan Sinha version, but I still bought the book. It was by some guy named Richard Wormser, and what sold me was not just the price (8 rupees, for the record), but the way it began.

“My name is Abu Hastin, and I am a djinn, or as some people prefer, a genie, or a jinn, or rather impolitely, a demon. Me, I prefer to called a genius.”

The story concerned itself with guardian djinns of cities who competed with each other in various aspects, and our friend Abu Hastin was a peeved djinn because the sultan of Baghdad, his city was an old nincompoop. The old king was interested more in fireworks and circus acts than statesmanship, and he was planning to marry off his beautiful daughter to the Crown Prince of Mossul, which effectively meant that Abu Hastin was to eat humble pie for at least fifty years, because he was not pally with the djinni of Mossul.

So he decides to take matters into his own hands. Which involves making sure that the princess meets and falls in love with the Thief of Baghdad.

It was a fantastic story, full of wit and adventure and snarky comments, and I remember reading and rereading it quite a number of times. It’s still at Guwahati though, and I think it’s out-of-print, at least because the name Richard Wormser does not ring a bell with anyone.

Now when vrikodhara showed me The Amulet of Samarkand in Bombay, I was kind of pissed at Jonathan Stroud. I was pretty sure that he had read the Thief of Baghdad when he was a kid, and decided to use the first-person-smart-talking-djinn to create a post-Potter young adult fantasy trilogy. Similar feelings persisted when I saw Artemis Fowl for the first time, but the premise of Fowl was a little more contemporary than Samarkand.

But boy, three books and one trilogy later, I have to admit that I was wrong about Jonathan Stroud. The Bartimaeus Trilogy rocks. Not because it’s fantasy and it has a smart-ass djinn in it, but because Stroud’s mixture of magic, politics and ancient history surpasses your average Young adult novel by miles. Refreshing characterisation – Nathaniel, the young protagonist does not have any claptrap like ancient prophecies hanging over his fate, frankly speaking, we do not know whether to like him or hate him because he changes over the three books, his life completely taken over by the politics of the reigning magicians of the day. in Ptolemy’s Gate, he has become John Mandrake, Information Minister, feared by commoners (i.e the non-magic wielding populace of the nation), privy to the Council of politician-magicians closest to Rupert Devereaux, the Prime Minister. Devereaux is himself a skilled magician, and over the course of time has become a perfect despot, choosing to ignore the grievances of his people, indulging in his love for theatre more than ever, and most importantly, forbidding the use the Staff of Gladstone and the Amulet of Samarkand to quell the enemies of the Empire. It is a time of much turmoil in England, as more and more commoners have become resilient to magic, and secret rebel organisations have cropped up against the ruling elite.

Bartimeus the djinn is still working for Mandrake, but even as the book begins, we discover that Mandrake has kept Bartimaeus away from The Other Place ( where all djinns and afrits and marids hail from) for so long that the poor guy has weakened, and needless to say, he is disgruntled. Even more so when Mandrake sends him on a solo mission to track a certain fugitive who had escaped their clutches several years ago (from the previous book, The Golem’s Eye). But then, a djinn’s got to do what a djinn’s got to do…The general complaint about The Golem’s Eye was that there was too much politics, and too less Bartimaeus, and this is not a complaint anyone should have with this book, at least. The footnotes leave you in splits, everytime.

Kitty Jones, the fugitive rebel from Book 2 is the third protagonist of Ptolemy’s Gate, and she has been making plans of her own all these years. Some of them involve Bartimaeus and his former master Ptolemy. Stroud interweaves his story with brief vignettes from Ptolemy’s life, and by Part 3 of the book, which comes somewhere in the middle, the build-up is complete. Part 4 ends with a shocker that I had been expecting, and the rest of the book deals with revenge ( you would be surprised at how many people..erm…individuals are looking to get their dishes served cold in this book, and how many of them do get their comeuppance), redemption, and yeah, closure. What an ending! Seriously, I doubt if anyone would expect the trilogy to end this way. I sincerely hope Jonathan Stroud does not get carried away by marketting possibilities and come up with spin-off series involving the characters or something.

If you haven’t read any of the Bartimaeus trilogy yet, I strongly suggest you do so immediately. This one’s a white-heat read for sure.

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Palomar, Locas, Memorywhatmemory?

We had five consecutive holidays at the office. Monday was a working day, but someone sent a mail asking all of us team leads to petition for a holiday on that day, and we did so, earning countless blessings in return.

What did I do these five days? Nothing. Unless you count the fact that on Wednesday night, I finished the fifteenth level of the Punisher game after an undocumented number of being killed and respawned and killed again, and am now onto the last level, called “Ryker’s Island”. In other news, inspite of a 256 MB graphics card, Half-Life 2 refuses to run on my machine. Does it require more than 1024*768 resolution to run by default? My monitor ( which happens to be moccacino‘s monitor), was bought just before the last tyrannosaurus rex on earth forgot to breathe and brought about premature extinction on himself, ergo, low-res. GTA San Andreas does run, though, but I don’t want to play it before I complete 100% of Vice City. What? I didn’t tell you? Of course I haven’t completed Vice City! I am a busy man. (Oh wait, that kind of negates the first two lines of this paragraph.)

The kind potnuru agreed to bring along two items from my amazon wishlist on his recent trip to India, and he also agreed to bring them along from Hyderabad to Bangalore. The items in question happen to be the humongous graphic novels Locas by Jaime Hernandez and Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories by Gilbert ‘Beto’ Hernandez. Two brothers, both amazing storytellers, two hardcover publications collecting ten years of stories published in the indie comic called Love and Rockets. I had one of Gilbert’s short fiction collection called Fear of Comics from an eBay sale ( autographed, too, hyuk) and one of Jaime’s, called Death of Speedy – needless to say, I did cartwheels when I heard of both these books coming out sometime in 2004, completist bastard that I am. It’s impossible to get complete runs of the L&R comics, as far as I know, and the early issues go for about 50-60$ each. Have begun reading Palomar, which is the story of a village, and hence has innumerable characters to keep track of. The cool thing is that Beto includes proper pronounciation guides for all the characters as footnotes – I didn’t know a Latin American character named Jesus would be pronounced “Hey-sooz”, for instance.

First pages of Locas and Palomar, and drawing samples of both the brothers…

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