Reading right

My friend Karen was responsible for at least two bad habits I have developed over the many years of my life. One of them is chocolate, the other is Asprin. Robert Asprin, writer of the Myth and Phule books; also Thieves World and various other such stories, but those I am not a fan of. Chocolate has been a fairly easily managed addiction – regular doses are always available and I am generally within range of a bite or three when I direly need it. And you can always go out and buy some dreadful version of it at the corner paan-beedi shop to keep the craving from consuming you past the point of concentration on more important issues that need to be dealt with, like work, dinner and small cats who demand food.

The other habit is less easy to foster. It all began many years ago, in a college co-ed dorm, when books were, for some indiscernible reason, more interesting than the men who were part of everyday life. For one, books were far more dishy to look at and, for another, perhaps more relevant, books had some substance, some mental challenge, some stimulative value. Having devoured all that I had brought with me and being too skint to buy more at the rate I read them, I leaned heavily on the college library and my various classmates and friends for more. I had gone through everything I found, from trashy bodice-rippers to dreary classics, and wanted something new and unpredictable when I met someone who so wonderfully fit just that description that we became close friends and still are. She cemented my initial curiosity at hearing her talking to herself (I wrote about that before) with her costume for Halloween – she went as a cutlery drawer, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt with the contents of her mother’s silverware cabinet stapled to her clothes.

Be that as it may (I always wanted to use that expression in something I wrote, but editors tend to very wisely cut it out), she introduced me to Robert Asprin, creator of Skeeve and his group of strange creatures. I read one, with a certain caution, since sci-fi/fantasy was not really to my taste. It was called Another Fine Myth, and starred a wannabe practitioner of magik, who gathered together, mainly serendipitously, a group of odd-bods who stuck it out with him through even more strange adventures. By the time he had met the Pervect, Aahz, I was hooked. It didn’t take long for me to get caught up in the activities, nefarious and otherwise, of the greens-skinned Tananda, the stone-bodied Gus, the keen-eyed Ajax and, of course, the unicorn Buttercup and the loyal baby dragon, Gleep. Before she knew what a monster she had unleashed, I had slurped down all her ‘Myth’ collection, forayed into various other realms, like Terry Pratchett, Frank Herbert, Douglas Adams, Robert Jordan, Anne McCaffrey, Barbara Hambley and more.

And I had developed not just a habit, but a serious problem. By the time I had read and then gradually collected all the Asprins I was interested in, which was the Myth series, my father found me a couple from his Phule list. I was re-hooked. I had friends and father scour the shelves of bookstores from London to Denver, to little avail. Asprin was on hiatus and I was deprived. When he started writing again, my book-hunting was revived, only to find that it was not easy to find him here, in India, and I had to depend on nice people to send me some from the US or UK, where he could be located after a little searching, driven by my nagging from halfway around the world. Now I find, doing research in the course of this blog, that he has rushed past me with at least two more books. Whom shall I attack now for my fix?