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! Did you know that adopting language altered the position of the human larynx, making us more susceptible to choking on food? I learned this because I’ve finished Blood Meridian, and was reading McCarthy’s musings on the evolution of language as a chaser. Proof, then, that the only truly fitting way to leave this world is to die choking on a book. Perhaps this week’s guest can recommend a good one?
This week, it’s former Fallen London lead designer, and Skin Deep, Pathologic 2, and Where the Water Tastes Like Wine writer Bruno Dias! Cheers Bruno! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
What are you currently reading?
Being in between major projects has me mostly disregarding research and just enjoying reading fiction for a while. I’m reading Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Tainted Cup. It’s billed as a ‘fantasy mystery novel’ but it’s pleasingly weirder than that; the setting is a sort of biopunk Ottoman Empire constantly beset by kaiju. Bennet engages in my favorite mode of dark fantasy storytelling, which is that he has believable characters in a completely insane world who are believable in their relationship to the insanity.
I’m also, very slowly, going through Clarice Lispector’s Todos os Contos (published in English a couple years ago as The Complete Stories). This is partially a re-read, partially new to me. I will pick it up and read a story every other week or so. I love these kinds of omnibuses set in chronological order; you can just keep going back to a writer over and over and watching them mature and age as artists and as people over time.
What did you last read?
It’s been a chaotic last few months where I’ve been reading a lot of samples, a lot of short fiction, and going back and re-reading a lot of influential things for me. I’m also a big believer in not finishing things; I drop books pretty aggressively. I think the last new-to-me novel I actually read cover to cover is Seth Dickinson’s Exordia, which to me is such a bolt-out-of-the-blue piece of writing. He’s also known for video game work, notably in the Destiny series. Recently I asked after who wrote some of the written matter in Obsidian’s Avowed, because I had an inkling it was him; I was, in fact, right. Dickinson just has such an instantly recognizable voice – a really playful way of pivoting around tone, and a knack for capturing the voice of creatures that don’t think like humans do.
On a much drier note: Ian Schreiber and Brenda Romero’s Game Balance. There’s probably very few people in the world to whom this book is truly relevant but I am very pleased that it exists because it’s both comprehensive and handy as a blunt weapon in a pinch.
What are you eyeing up next?
I don’t really keep a reading list or a backlog; I tend to pick things based on the moment. But the big pile of unread samples I do keep includes Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Cuckoo, Jennifer Croft’s The Extinction Of Irena Rey, Kiersten White’s Mister Magic, Emily Nussbaum’s Cue The Sun, and Daniel M. Lavery’s Women’s Hotel.
What quote or scene from a book sticks with you the most?
Oddly enough, probably the Gom Jabbar scene early in Dune. I don’t think it’s the best scene in the book, from a writing standpoint, but at this point in my life I’ve read it twice and seen three different film and television versions of it, so it’s just holographically engraved in my mind. “What’s in the box?” “Pain.”
What book do you find yourself bothering friends to read?
Whenever it comes up, I’ll always tell people to read Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics. I think to English speakers, Invisible Cities is more familiar; but Cosmicomics in particular is one of the most influential books on how I write. A genuinely mind-expanding piece of fiction. There’s stuff in Fallen London that I would tie almost directly to that book. The book is made up of loosely-connected short stories about a singular character who, surreally, recounts memories of living through different events in the history of the universe – the Big Bang, the formation of the solar system, and so on. It’s beautifully inventive ‘science fiction’ in an extremely literal sense – every story is directly inspired by one notable fact about cosmology or the history of the Earth.
What book would you like to see someone adapt to a game?
Video games are obviously really good at impossible spaces – from Portal to this year’s Blue Prince. So in my wildest dreams I’d love to see someone take a stab at Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi. It’s got it all: a mutable space to explore; a knowledge mismatch between player and player character; a bunch of opportunities for little economies, systems, affordances. I can’t think of a book that’s more like a video game without being about video games.
Not only did Bruno fail to name every book ever written, but also failed to specify which of these books could easily be swallowed in a single gulp. Therefore, I have no choice but to label this week’s edition of the column a choking hazard, and ban you all from reading it. Watch your tender larynxes out there, and book for now!
