Bargain heads-ups:

Hitman 2,3&4 in one box for 699
Shogun and Medieval: Total War Gold Editions (game + exp pack) for 699...each

And in the "Mathey pe chutiya likha hai kya?" category:
Halo 2 PC version for 1649/- (+ cost of Windows Vista).

Maybe it's Microsoft's strategy to further increase the appeal of Halo 3 and the 360. Halo 3 available for 1895, CE tin box and added goodies for 300 more.

Half-Life 2 for FREE [:D]
One of the guys on Avault got the Orange Box and since he already owned HL2 offered the Steam key for that.

Apparently the Orange Box is available locally for 699, that's an awesome baragin if true.

ravenus wrote:
Arrey, sounds like a cool haul. Is the RK stuff by Viking? I myself prefer the Mysore books paperbacks. They're far cheaper and also or evocative of the small-town ambiance that RK's works are focused on...unless you got it at some sale price [:D]

Lovecraft might have been expensive, I think. The cheapest I have found are the Del-Ray paperback collections. Go 'em from Fact n' Fiction in Delhi.

Poe hardcover sounds great too. I got the complete too, but in soft-cover and for what, 600 bucks I think [:(]. But the stuff is worth reading.
I'm not aware of the publisher of the RKN stuff, but will let you know when it finally does blossom in my hands. I can understand the Mysore paperback ambience hustling through your fingers as you pick them up and read, but I personally have a problem with the fonts. As long as the fonts are smudged or typewritten or photocopied types I'll have a big problem reading through them as it's sorta blasphemous and any evocation of town/village memories is almost nil. I remember reading some shit cheap version of Puzo's The Godfather and finding the overall impact quite dampening as much as I tried to ignore it, and then somewhat a year later I happened to get a properly printed version from a friend and enjoyed it all the more even though most of the plot-points were cemented deep within me from the previous reading. So I like them to be blotchlessly clean and clear. I guess it takes all types to make the world. :)

And yeah, I agree that the Library of America versions are a little pricier, but I'm a huge fan of Lovecraft's masterly prose and vocabulary, so it's all very justified. Many a times I go through - a bunch of printed pages stapled together - certain stories of his again and again just to simply revel in the way he weaves words into sentences and the same sentences into paragraphs. So I can definitely see myself poring through his works again with the mindset of one who is set about to unravel that big secret of how does he do it. Haha.

I skimmed through two or three of Poe's stories somewhere in the world wide web and found them pretty kickass too; couldn't care less about his poems, but it seems the efforts to separate them - conjoined twins - would prove fatal to the literary world. And no matter with what degree of unmeasurable malice these certain people belittle Kerouac's writings as garbage, I unabashedly admit I'm pretty fond of the same garbage.

Since I was out of town for nearly a month, I fished quite a bunch of books.

The Sicilian by Mario Puzo
Night Shift by Stephen King
Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami
The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl - it contains around 48 of 'em.
The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh
Istanbul: Memories of a City by Orhan Pamuk
Snow by Orhan Pamuk
The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk
Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels & Stories Vol. 1
Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels & Stories Vol. 2
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman

I asked around for China Mieville with bated breath, but the response I got was similar to that of when you enquire about an unknown sorcerer living up the hills. Also wanted to pick up Wind-up and Underground by Murakami, but argh, they were pricier than 3/4ths' of the stuff in the stores. Well, there's always a next time.

I'd have warned you about Dance Dance Dance. It's a book where pretty much nothing happens till...well, pretty much nothing happens in the entire book. It starts off brilliantly with the riff of a hotel being haunted by the ghost of an older hotel but that's left by the wayside till the end and not well revived either.

And The Alchemist? Tell me it's because you want to impress some chick.

I suspect you could have got the Sherlock Holmes much cheaper than that edition...it does look handsome though. But I also need a rough-use Holmes collection I can read through while having meals/snacks.

Ah, similar views. I'll post in the Reading thread.

Oh btw the Half Life box is a 1000 bucks. Still not bad considering how much they've crammed into it.

I finally got hold of China Mieville. 'Perdido Street Station' and 'The Scar,' alongwith, hahah, 'Stock Investing for Dummies'.

I skimmed through both the Mieville stuff at random and found them really captivating as expected, but will plod through them when I finish the short stories by Philip K. Dick, which is quite good except for the abrupt "AAAHHHH, I'm fading now into oblivion! What the fuck is happening?! *CLICK* *CLICK* *End credits roll*" type endings, which quite gets on your nerves when it's repeated everywhere. But, I guess that's a major aesthetic of Sci-fi.

Brought The Departed- 2 Disc Special Edition and LA Confidential- Special Edition dvd's for like $3 each ...not bad buy.

DeepDiscount has a 20% discount sale going on till 25th on all DVD's. Thinking of buying the Mario Bava Box Sets and Yojimbo-Sanjuro Criterion Set (for 40$ its a pretty good deal).

Anyone seen Bava's 4 Times that Night and 5 dolls for August Moon ? I guess these are the only ones I havn't seen from that box set.

Even if those movies are bad the set'll be worth it.

Got DVD's of Johnny Gaddaar (299/-) and Gandhi, My Father (349/-)

I saw Johnny Gaddaar yesterday on the Adlabs DVD, I was kinda disappointed with it (the DVD of course...The movie was total fun). At some places the screen pixels got crumpled a bit especially when there was too much red on the screen. It wasnt too obvious but still it was like watching a DIVX print. I wonder if that is a fault with my laptop or the a problem with the DVD. Let me know about the quality of your DVD.

Haven't noticed that happening although I admit I didn't give it a keen-eyed appraisal and watching it on a low-end TV is not the best guide. One problem I had was with the DVD logo plastered on the top-right of the screen throughout the movie. Fucking cunts.

I heard the commentary and that was nice if a little unpolished and it had it's share of several moments where people are only reacting to what's happening onscreen. It was nice to know about the various references (must try to see Asphalt Jungle) and the various places they used CGI in a non-obvious manner.

Brought Sodersbergh's Solaris and 25th Hour for like $3.50 each.

Also guys, you can also get the 2-Disc extended version of Planet Terror for less than $4 from Buy.com. It is listed for $10 but use Google Checkout for a 10$ discount so you are only charged for shippting and taxes which will bring it to somewhere around $4. Just ordered mine! [;)]