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Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week – our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! The longest novel ever written is generally agreed to be Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past – a coward’s pick, since it’s actually 13 different volumes. Don’t let Proust’s despicable lies sully the joy of literature for you, though. He did have a good quality moustache – a far more important literary trait than actually doing any writing, imo.
This week, it’s ITU Copenhagen Games Professor and Broken Rules co-founder, Martin Pichlmair! Cheers Martin! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
What are you currently reading?
I am currently over 1800 pages into the Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson. The three books of this trilogy are one long, wild ride through 17th century history. Within a few pages it goes from swashbuckling pirate adventure to musings about the birth of science. And then it throws in slapstick comedy. And detailed social analysis. A book to lose yourself in, which is certainly better than finding yourself in it, given that pretty much everyone in it is a different shade of nightmare.
What did you last read?
The most interesting book I recently finished is the Dictionary Of The Khazars by Milorad Pavić, a one-of-a-kind experience: a dictionary that tells a story. You read about the same events from three perspectives by looking up keywords in three different dictionaries, piecing together what happened based on what three different unreliable narrators noted about an event. And then there is an overlaid different story that is about the dictionary itself and its history. And everything is connected. If Wikipedia was a game, it would take the shape of this book.
What are you eyeing up next?
I am very much looking forward to The Maniac by Benjamin Labatut, a fictional biography of John von Neumann. Labatut writes about science and its role in the world. But he takes the liberty to go beyond the usual boundaries of a biography. I think he tries to write historical accounts that are more real than purely factual reality because the repercussions of past events reverberate in the text. It’s hard to explain but I can absolutely recommend his earlier work When We Cease To Understand The World.
What quote or scene from a book sticks with you the most?
It’s not a particular scene but one thing I love is when a book points at a whole world that exists just out of sight. The origin of the title-giving Excession (Iain M. Banks). The ecosystem down in the mines of Moria that is easily disturbed by throwing a rock down a hole (J.R.R. Tolkien). The cities beyond the edge of medieval maps that lure the characters in Umberto Eco’s Baudolino. Those places stick to me because I am myself lured into filling them with fantastic creatures a la “here be dragons”. Oh and the line that sticks is “it was the day my grandmother exploded” (Crow Road, Iain Banks) – what an opener!
What book do you find yourself bothering friends to read?
I keep telling everyone to read Katie Mack’s The End of Everything, a non-fiction masterpiece about all the ways our universe can (and will, one day) end. This book manages to do the magic trick of on one hand telling you straight that all existence could just end in the blink of an eye, while on the other hand giving a lot of hope as it shifts your perspective from concerns about small everyday issues to topics so big you can only accept them. Those small topics are of course what makes Negative Space (BR Yeager) such a delight and I want to use this opportunity to double down on what was written in this place last week: it’s the best social-realism horror I’ve ever read and I’m shouting about it from any dilapidated roof I can find.
What book would you like to see someone adapt to a game?
It’s a children’s book, or maybe proto-YA, but ever since I read it at the age of maybe 12, I thought The Brothers Lionheart by Astrid Lindgren would be a perfect fit for a game. It’s the only book I know that features permadeath (which curiously is a less permanent form of death) as a concept. And that in 1974. There are but a few books that feature a metagame – this is one of them.
I’ve actually given up trying to count the amount of books my guests mention to see how close they’ve come to naming every book ever written. I’ve become so adept at spotting failure to complete this column’s very secret objective that all it takes is a brief glance. And yet, I press on. The bravest man in games media, some say. Book for now!