Mimi Mondal

Day 11: A Book From Your Favourite Author

If it had been difficult to select an image for Day 9, it is near enough impossible to select an image that does justice to today’s post, so I’m cheating by putting up rough sketches made by Neil Gaiman himself when he was conceiving of The Sandman. These books (there are twelve trade paperbacks and numerous spin-offs and extras) are perhaps the most spectacular and uniformly brilliant collaborations of our generation. There are more artists than I can care to count and an equal number of excellent images, leave alone an artist like Dave McKean whose illustrations are crazy and unbelievable and each a masterpiece in itself.

Once again, I’m at a loss of words to describe a book for the uninitiated. All I can say is that everyone I know who has read The Sandman has been transformed by it, and there’s very little one can compare it to, or say it’s like this or like that. I’ve met people who read only comic books and people who read nothing but ‘serious literature’ who are equally enamoured with it, and I’ve met writers and artists who swear by it with similar devotion. Many a time I have connected with a fan of The Sandman instantly, even when we were strangers, and have managed to have fulfilling conversations even though we had nothing else in common. (This is usually not easy for me.) The Sandman is a faith and a lifestyle.

Another reason why this is a cheat post (and one that is true for Day 3/4, Day 5, Day 6 and a few more upcoming posts) is that I am trying to eliminate options for Day 30, which concludes this meme with Your Favourite Book Of All Time. I simply had to include The Sandman somewhere in the list, and this is the best place for it because Gaiman comes closest to being my all-time favourite author. My loyalty usually rests on a book-by-book basis. I am hugely overwhelmed by Terry Pratchett in Discworld, for example, but I don’t dig his non-Discworld writing. Funnily enough (especially for myself), I love pretty much everything Gaiman dishes out. I love his text novels and short stories and poems and minor comics and stuff for children. I even love his blogging (okay, maybe a little less than his books), and that’s quite a bit excessive, considering how little of that I do for other authors (or artists in any other form). I just love that man’s brain! — and I think he is the only one.
And he may have grown old and doesn’t look like that anymore, but that didn’t prevent him even the littlest bit from breaking a million hearts when he got married last year.

Day 10: A Book You Wish You Could Live In

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A book (in this case a series) that you’ve read, re-read, analyzed, speculated and fantasized about for the largest part of your life is bound to leave a strong enough imprint somewhere. Admitted that the world of Harry Potter is flawed and badly imagined. J. K. Rowling has barely done any world-building that bears up to the scope of the series, and the bits that go beyond the immediate necessities of her plot are fuzzy and dubious. For one, there aren’t enough adults in the world of Harry Potter — makes you really wonder where so many students released from Hogwarts every year go.

The visualization in the early Harry Potter films (at least the first three films) is also trite and unappealing, and pretty much the only official depiction of the world that I like are Mary GrandPré‘s illustrations for the American book covers. Admittedly, it is not a very fun world to live in — especially during the timeline of the book — if you aren’t one of Harry Potter’s best friends, and sometimes not even then. You are either missing out on the action and feeling resentful about it, or getting the action — which is worse, because no one in the series has any fun except Harry. (Okay, maybe Dumbledore, but who wants to be Dumbledore? Admiring him as a father-figure is another thing.) But then, this is a world that I’ve seen rising up from scratch and spreading and growing complex as I grew up, I feel familiar with it (and with its deficiencies too). When the events in the books are over, I believe it would be a pretty good place have a lifetime.

P.S. I would also have been perfectly happy as an Oompa Loompa in Mr. Wonka’s chocolate factory, but I don’t feel so good about the ownership passing on to Charlie. Little boys are delightful creatures (as are old men), but little boys grow up and young men are just a little complicated. :D

Day 9: A Book You Thought You Wouldn’t Like But Ended Up Loving

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As you can probably tell from the last post, I run away very fast from books that are famous for being immortal romance. I don’t usually pick up comedy-of-manners type literature (although The Great Gatsby is hardly a comedy) either, unless it is very contemporary and very cutting. Even when I bought this book I did not intend to read it. It was very slim and very cheap, which made it the ideal birthday gift for someone I did not care much about but whose party I was expected to attend. I succeeded in squeezing out of the invitation eventually, so the book stayed with me. (Yes, I am exactly that uncivil.) And precisely because it was a very thin book, I decided I might as well read it in an evening.

As the post title declares, I loved the book thoroughly. I love the soppy bits a little less, but they are controlled and do not overwhelm the story. The style of the novel (and I’m not even talking about the style of writing) is effortless and impeccable. It helps that the 1920s in America — the jazz age — is one of my favourite periods culturally. That’s perhaps the reason that I had a hard time choosing an image for this post. I love almost all the covers this book has been published in. A concise and classy book. Just the way I like ’em.

Day 8: Most Overrated Book

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What can I say? I have friends (very dear ones, too) who consider this book an absolute favourite. I initally had put down a different book for this post — and one can never run out of options for really bad and really popular books — but they are celebrating seventy-five years of the publication Gone With the Wind, and last week my newspaper supplement devoted an entire edition to it, with ludicrous claims like ‘Frankly, you’d have to be a right varmint to not give a damn about this epic book-film combination.’ I imagine I would be exactly that, because in my opinion, this here is one hell of an awful book. It’s not perhaps the most awful book in the history of literature, but it’s the size of two bricks, the writing is tiresome (no wonder Mitchell never wrote another book, small mercy if anything), the protagonist makes you want to slap her and you secretly cheer each time life screws her up a little — seriously, what’s there to love?

The fact is that I’ve noticed one warped tendency among fans of Gone With The Wind, especially those who champion it as an immortal romance — everyone loves the ending, where Rhett Butler most cruelly (and I’m assuming most unexpectedly) dumps Scarlett O’Hara. (I love the ending too, but then that’s all I love about the book. If I was one of the characters in the novel, I’d have thrown a party to celebrate!) Now, romance is not my favourite genre, but basic romance-reading psychology isn’t supposed to go like that. You see off your hero and heroine riding off happily into the sunset, and you feel a little Mary Sue glow in your heart. Why do people love the ending of Gone With The Wind, then? My personal theory is that whether they admit it or not, everyone hates Scarlett a little. Everyone hopes for her to get royally screwed at some point, so the ending works as a bit of poetic justice. It’s not even a feminist novel, precisely because of the ending. You want brave, cunning, devious heroine who straightens up her stinking lot with style and success, go read Vanity Fair.
What more, the title of the novel is a spectacular wastage of a poem that is perfectly divine otherwise.

97

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Holidays absolutely scramble my brains. I think I’m one of those people who only function well on deadlines. All my creative output also springs from deadlines — bits of poetry, fiction, drawings just when I’m aware that I shouldn’t. Last evening I finally reached the end of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, two days after I should’ve finished reading it for the exam, but I try to believe exams are not the only reason to read books (unless they are unpleasant books, of course). I’m not sure if ‘like’ is the word I should associate with Murakami’s writing — Norwegian Wood had given me a strong and lasting depression, it’s one of the books I’m afraid to re-read — but maybe it won’t be incorrect to say I like his vision and his impact. I didn’t start reading Hard-Boiled Wonderland till the end of the first two exams but it took me in quick, its premise was interesting although I think the effect dissolves towards the end. You could tell how it was a pre-Norwegian Wood novel. Even After Dark (the only other Murakami I’ve read) is more precise and sure-footed about its pressure points, despite its much smaller scale.

I need to learn how to sharpen my kitchen knives because all of them are blunt. Just now I had to slice a lemon with the meat cleaver; the small vegetable knife would just not sink through the rind.

Of the things I’m looking forward to this year, these are at the top of the list:

River of Smoke, which I find a greatly unmemorable name compared to Sea of Poppies, but I can’t wait for the book. Even though I do agree with the point P made on her blog about the second book of trilogies usually being a drag. This was also the first book I pre-ordered in my life (which, of course, has more to do with the huge discount they’re offering at Flipkart).
The final Harry Potter movie.
Snuff.
The Tintin movie.

That is a vaguely chronological list although about these things, who can tell. That’s also only a list of upcoming things; there are existing things that I want to catch up on like novels by Kundera and Umberto Eco and all the Woody Allen films I have not seen. I want someone to give me a collection of Pixar shorts. I want to sit at the rooftop at B&B with a chilled beer and watch a diffused gray sunset over this stupid city that does not let me go away. I am very excited about this book called Insects Are Just Like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings which arrived a couple of days ago (Flipkart again, thank god for Flipkart), but I will leave this for another post because I have such a lot to say about it. Also, just thought I’d mention that I do not at all feel impressed by the song called ‘Bhaag D. K. Bose’ that seems all the rage these days. Edgy lyrics alright but the tune just refuses to catch. I wonder if this will change.

I want to make pasta and chicken and a chocolate cake with walnuts in it but god, it’s so hot. The kitchen feels like a slice of hell all the time since the sun is up. I can’t bear to swallow my morning tea after 8 AM so on days I wake up late, there is no tea and I feel sluggish and can muster up enthusiasm for nothing except stay in bed and read. Or watch music videos on Youtube when the internet connection feels benevolent enough.

It’s a Sunday morning and my mother is wandering around the house talking incessantly on the phone. Chhoto Pishi, Mejo Jetthu, Chhoto Mami, so on and so forth. I’m listening to the constant chatter over the whirring of the washing machine and the splurts and hisses from the kitchen and vaguely wondering how she has so much to say, because I can find nothing to say to most of my relatives, even the ones closer to my age like Cousin A and Cousin L, who keep up this one-sided effort to stay in touch. Cousin R is getting divorced and I should maybe phone him but I always forget. I’m listening but I’m not really tuning in; later Ma will tell me snatches of these conversations and I will absentmindedly nod, repeating all the time in my head, whoa really. (Whoa really nothing. Just whoa, really.)

It took me about three hours to write this blog post because I keep getting distracted and going away. I have a few more things to say but at the moment I can’t compose them into coherent lines. There’s so much else to do. Which one is your main task and which one’s the distraction? You wonder, you forget, this flotsam-like nowhereness is your life. Perhaps.