Book Post!

I read Latha Anantharaman's column, Bookwise, in yesterday's The Hindu: Metroplus with that unmistakable sense of joy that I always experience on reading a fellow bibliophile's account of her love affair with books. In this installment, she talks about the joy of receiving books by post. Here's a delectable extract from the column in which Latha places an online order for the Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf and waits in suspense over the sort of tastelessly produced edition she might end up with —

For Rs. 250 and free delivery I expected a cheap India-only edition, with some
typographical errors. What I got was an impeccable Norton critical edition, and
the supreme happiness of getting a book in the post. Since then, editors have
sent volumes by post for review, sometimes in slender packets, sometimes in a
hefty cardboard box. Generous friends send book parcels.

This resonates well with me, because I've always lamented the lack of the suspense element in my encounters with books (see my post Bookish Dreams and Other Speculations). The closest I ever got to waiting in suspense for a book was when my uncle mailed me the first volume, The Solitudes, of John Crowley's Ægypt novel cycle from London. It arrived a week later, neatly packed in a padded envelope (lined on the inside with bubble wrap!), and I held in my hand a beautiful, firmly bound paperback edition, published by The Overlook Press. For the first time in my life I experienced "the supreme happiness of getting a book in the post". I knew beforehand what book and exactly what edition I was about to get, having looked it up in Amazon.com myself. Therefore, my satisfaction was predominantly derived from the physical act of holding the book in my hands, ruffling through its pages and taking in the sweet odour. Unfortunately, unlike Latha, I haven't received books by post since then. Nevertheless I'm happy that her column got me thinking about this.

The Library of Babel

I've decided to add a new page, The Library of Babel, to this blog. The stimulants behind this effort are the Recommended Reading and Books Read in 2010 pages in Heather's blog, Say the Trees Have Ears. In the Recommended Reading page she maintains a list of short descriptions of books that may be of interest to readers of her blog, apart from being her own favourites. The Books Read in 2010 page contains a list of books that she has so far finished (re)reading this year. She rates these books on a scale of 0-5. One amazing thing I came to know on reading her entry For the Love of Books is that she's read 156 (!) books in 2009 alone and on an average reads 100 books a year! That's truly amazing for someone like me, because I'm not sure if I've finished reading a hundred books in all my years as a serious reader, though I must have read hundreds of books in bits and parts. However, I've always wanted to maintain a list of the books in my collection (library?). So, The Library of Babel will contain the ever evolving list of my favourite books (regardless of whether they've been read in full and digested or only nibbled at!) and maybe, as well, a small list of those books that I intend to add to my collection (and read!) in the near future.

12 Angry Men: A Borgesian Review

This is one movie that I was desperate to see and in the end, unable to catch it on TV or on DVD, I watched it on my ipod! For those who are not aware, 12 Angry Men is a 1957 movie, directed by Sidney Lumet (who later directed the widely acclaimed Murder on the Orient Express based on Agatha Christie's novel of the same name) and shot in black and white.

The premise is simplicity itself. On the conclusion of a murder trial, in which a boy's life hangs in the balance as he stands accused of having murdered his father, the twelve member jury is required to come out with a unanimous verdict. It is understood that a verdict of guilty is tantamount to a sentence of death. The jurors retire to discuss the case and find that all of them except one - juror #8 (played by Henry Fonda) - are convinced of the boy's guilt. And on this momentous imbalance turns the plot of what is, according to me, one of the best movies ever made.

The scene of action is entirely restricted to the juror's discussion room. I can't think of a better sentence to describe the closed space than the following quote from Hamlet, "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space". As the movie progresses, the metaphor of the closed space becoming infinite works on two levels. On one level there's the obstinately objective and morally imaginative juror #8, trying to pry open the closed, prejudiced minds of the jurors to let them look at the case in an infinitely objective light. And as this begins to happen the room itself becomes a model of human society and grows infinitely larger, encompassing all the good and all the bad that humans are capable of. Mind numbing hatred, mediocrity, rationality, politeness, rudeness, prejudice in all its forms, every vice and every virtue in varying degrees find their place among the twelve jurors. It is comforting, though, that in the end objective reasoning and rationality win out.

None of this must, however, give anyone the impression that the movie is one long sermon about the conflict between reason and prejudice. One of the amazing things about this movie is that director Sidney Lumet and writer Reginald Rose take this simple, morally loaded premise and spin it into a taut, tightly scripted thriller with a mathematical proof of a screenplay! A thriller it definitely is. One that achieves edge-of-the-seat perfection by slowly and steadily building up tension by letting twelve different characters talk amongst themselves and taking the discussion irrevocably to its logical conclusion. Factual thinking and reasoning are all the rage now in corporate sectors. Here's a movie that's a supreme example of just that. For this reason let me reassert my opinion. One of the best movies ever made!