Products You May Like
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! You know books, right? They’re like RPS articles, but slightly better for piling under a flock mat to make little hills for your plastic spacemen. Fitting, then, that this week it’s plastic spaceman enthusiast, writer on Absolver, Nightingale, Gladius, and Total War: Warhammer 3, and Ten Things Video Games Can Teach Us author, Dan Griliopoulos! Cheers Dan! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
What are you currently reading?
I’m reading a superb, impressively comprehensive collection called The Weird, curated by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer. It’s nearly a million words long, it contains entire novellas like Tainaron. I started it in 2021. I will always have been reading it.
What did you last read?
The Mountain In The Sea. A solid novel about octopus intelligence that feels like it draws heavily on the same well as Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds and An Immense World by Ed Yong. I’m fascinated by the concept of ‘Umwelt’ – that our minds are so limited by our perceptions and neural structures, and how alien that makes species so near to us. E.g. Tories.
What are you eyeing up next?
Fact-wise, Marijam Did’s book called Everything To Play For, which is about how video games are changing the world. I’m talking with her about it at Conway Hall in November so thought I’d better read it… Fiction-wise, I want to try this The Library at Mount Char everyone’s talking about.
What quote or scene from a book has stuck with you?
Scene, the Dead Marshes in Lord of the Rings. Really captured my childhood of miserable, damp, grim trudging across Northern peat bogs smartly.
Quote, my head’s full of ancient snippets, mainly from Eliot and Auden, e.g:
“I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”
What book do you find yourself bothering friends to read?
“You, the reader who is also a reader, are of course familiar with Italo Calvino, but aren’t sure if you’ve read all his works, despite Gril’s spittle-laced urgings to do so – Invisible Cities, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler, Cosmicomics, Difficult Loves… all these he has imprecated you to consume. In passing, as a lip-curled afterthought, he refers to Building Blocks Of Tabletop Games: An Encyclopedia Of Mechanisms. You baulk at the cost, but glancing inside you are entranced…”
What book would you like to see someone adapt to a game?
Myself, I want to adapt George Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual. It’s a procedural Oulipo book, from the same French surrealist background as the Exquisite Corpse. It’s a book about puzzles set in a single moment of time in an apartment block with an insoluble puzzle at its heart. I’ve never finished reading it, but have restarted it endlessly.
I want someone else to do some Iain Banks, probably The Player Of Games or so I can play it. Respawn would do it justice.
In a twist so devious I’m still reeling from it, Dan actually attempted to satisfy the very secret goal of this column by starting to name every book in existence. I’m not kidding. He sent me 400 of the things. I’ve copied them into a PDF here, in case the CMS shit itself to death.
However, if we take for granted the fact so many books exist that any finite list of books is as far away from naming them all as to effectively make no dent in the total amount, then in the Zeno’s Arrow sense of the task, Dan actually named no books, save the paltry amount in the article. Another week, another miserable failure. Ah well, there’s always next time! Book for now!