just came back from the library! took them a while to arrive and still missing one or two (Sapiens and Krik? Krak!) but I’ll have my hands full anyways. Exciting times ahead!
Your description and the quote were so on point that I hoped to find these in my local branch, but it looks like all the copies are at the Chinatown location. Gonna make a day of it and visit it instead of asking for it to be sent to my local one just for the fun of it (echoeing @FishHead’s sentiments here)
since there was some interest in a “writing circle” (i don’t know why i chose that phrasing but i decided to stick with it), i created a google form to more formally gauge participation and format.
please fill it out if you are interested or let me know if there are questions etc. i will probably bump this again later in the week in case it flies under anyones radar.
I agree with @yeso that @radicaledward should answer that question, but if he were here, he’d recommend the works of Robin Hobb, and I’d second that! Her saga has the most JRPG-like beginning (orphaned boy discovers the world around him and develops his powers through a series of trials), and her character work is the best I’ve seen in the fantasy genre. Far more satisfying than Brando Sando, though I’ll admit he does cool action scenes better.
I wrote an article for a local video game zine about some game-related books, figured I’d share it here too! I don’t usually write out longer stuff. It was good practice. I feel I’ve been percolating on these recommendations for a long time!
BOOKS ABOUT VIDEO GAMES
A READING LIST FOR A BETTER FUTURE
By [Gemstonez]
These modern, non-fiction books have all provided groundbreaking shifts of perspective for me as I’ve grown more curious about making games. Taken as a whole, these books have laid an inspirational groundwork for me as I want to try to create in ways that are empathetic, socially conscious and community-based. Generally, these books skew towards social studies and are meticulously researched and sourced. I’d highly recommend them!
Briefly, here’s why each book struck a chord:
For some context and history of how broken the current corporate landscape is for largescale video game production and its workers, look no further than the three published books written by Jason Schreier (1). The reader is given a behind-the-curtain look at how the sausage is made in a way that is always interesting and often feels like an eye-opening compendium of horror stories. Surely, one would think, there’s a more sustainable way to do all of this.
And that idea of locating a more sustainable path for creating games is at the heart of The Video Game Industry Does Not Exist (2). As someone who dedicated his twenties to the local DIY music community, I was blown away by some of the parallels to those practices that were suggested here. Keogh advocates for a similar style of mutual aid and community building for game-makers, and he compares some initiatives that have taken place in parts of Australia over the years that have led to more self-sustaining development cycles. I’m excited to witness our own weird web here in the Midwest and help identify ways we can lift each other up here.
Playframes: How Do We Know When We Are Playing? (3) discusses the layers of subtle communication that go into developing styles of play in unique contexts and sends out an important warning signal to beware the ways that people may try to play us for their own purposes. I found it to be a very interesting read as someone who finds it much easier to create than to communicate! It’s so important to be on the same page.
More Than a Glitch (4) speaks more broadly to the oversights and devious manipulations of data that have been baked into technology practices, and Art in the After-Culture (5) looks at the arts through the lens of our ongoing late capitalist crises. Both books bear witness to the many ways our rapidly changing world has been causing harm faster than we can make sense of it and how arts and technology are wrapped up in it all.
Finally, Glitch Feminism (6) by Legacy Russell compares a glitch in the system to radical self-love and liberation and proposes a powerful call to action. It’s a beautiful manifesto that encourages us to embrace our weird selves and stay revolutionary.
Okay, now it’s your turn to recommend some video games about books!
*These books are available as open access PDF’s. All the rest should be available through your local library.
I highly recommend you give The First Law books by Joe Abercrombie a crack if you haven’t. They are technically the first of three trilogies (The First Law, the “standalone books” and The Age of Madness). Each series could be read in isolation but are far more rewarding read in publication order. As per your post there are a lot of characters who span a number of the books and I found loveable (although most of them are awful people).
They just keep getting better as the series goes on imo, so if you like the first one it’s a good sign to keep on reading. It’s dark and graphic but also humorous, so I guess YMMV on the tone.
Also seconding the Hobb suggestions although I am not through the series yet so can’t comment on the longevity of them, but have heard nothing but great things about her work.
Having recently finished Confessions then rereading Sailor its kind of wild how true the “skeleton key” description is. Imo Confessions I think might be my favorite of his that I’ve read so far. I’ve got my eye on the tetralogy next, if I decide to dive back in.
This makes me think what other examples there are of other “skeleton key” books there are out there for other authors. And does that kind of book have to be written in “confessional” or first person form for it to count as one?
If I had to hazard a guess we can define such a book as either:
Idk if this is anything but this book got me thinking about it.
Anyways, about the book itself Confessions felt like a very transparent self-inventory that felt claustrophobic sometimes but kept me enticed. What kept me interested in the book was a kind of morbid interest in how this person thought and went about his life and his relationships to others. It felt like a very intense book, his outlook has a sickly, upside-down world feeling to it that is hard to describe. In some parts it reminded me of Ernesto Sabato’s El Tunel which evoked similar feelings.
I think the most salient example of Confessions allowing a “deeper” reading of Sailor was his obsession with the sea, it seemed that it had a mystic attraction to Mishima and this is at the forefront of Sailor and if I recall correctly, The Sound of Waves.
Onetti has a great answer to this question because he has two: El pozo which is the thematic and to an extent tonal rosetta stone which is as you describe, “confessional” and solipsistic (it’s as we’ve discussed a little itt a antecedent to El tunel. But then La vida breve is the technical “skeleton key” because it’s able to go beyond that form and manages a full articulation of those themes and tones. What’s interesting is how this isnt just notable as a display of technical skill, but how it allows Onetti to really explore and describe his subject matter in a way he couldnt before when he was confined by the formal straightforwardness of that prior book. Onetti also poses another kind of key novel, which is I guess a final judgement or apotheosis with Dejemos hablar al viento (good title). I’ll have to give it some thought before I can give a detailed description of how all this all works: it’s complicated and also one of the most interesting things a writer has ever done, at least as far as my reading has taken me
I have been summoned!
I have read a lot of Brandon Sanderson and my wife is currently reading one of his books. In general, I would not recommend him to anyone older than 18, but people sure do seem to like him. I think several of his books are almost explicitly influenced by the Final Fantasy series. Both Mistborn and The Stormlight Archive being the most obvious ones.
I would really recommend Guy Gavriel Kay. Almost all his books are standalone, which is nice, but they also have interesting intersections and resonances. He writes what can be described as fantastical historical fiction. It is a secondary world with its own magics and nations and gods and whathaveyou, but he uses this other world to write what amounts to historical fiction, excepting a few books, including the one I’ll recommend!
Tigana is not my favorite book of his but I distinctly remember saying to myself about 100 pages in: This is a JRPG. It’s darker and more mature than most JRPGs but the first half of the book especially felt like one to me. I think his best book is The Lions of al-Rassan, which is about Moorish Spain and especially the intersection between Christians, Muslims, and Jews.
Like @whatsarobot said, I will always recommend Robin Hobb. I cannot say enough good things about her Realm of the Elderlings series, which is made up of five trilogies of books. They’re not especially like JRPGs, but they’re about as good as it gets not just for fantasy but for writing in general. The first trilogy is the weakest but the second novel absolutely shocked me in a way that led me to read on through the rest.
Joe Abercrombie’s books have a JRPG-ness to them. He’s a writer who keeps getting better as he writes, which is nice and weirdly rare among writers of all types, but I don’t really care much for his first trilogy.
The Wheel of Time is a series that I hate but millions upon millions of people love. It definitely has a JRPG feel to it and is borderline plagiarism of Dune. You might ask yourself why I’ve read so many books I don’t like and all I can say or myself is that I am a very foolish boy.
Tad Williams’ Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn has a nice JRPG feel to it and was a big influence and inspiration for George Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. It’s very Tolkieny, but in a good way rather than a purely derivative way. The writing in the trilogy massively improves from book to book but the first book has awkward sentences where the very obvious bad guy will do things like smile evilly.
One of the only fantasy trilogies of recent memory to impress me was Empire of the Wolf by Richard Swan. I’ll say it fits the bill well enough for a JRPG but it’s really more like Judge Dredd in renaissance style fantasy world.
NK Jemisin is a writer who seems very influenced by anime and JRPGs so she’s worth checking out as well. I’ve liked most of her books but I also can’t remember a single thing about any of them, which isn’t exactly a compliment, but I’ve read, I think, nine of them and have enjoyed six of them a lot while reading them. They just don’t really stick with me.
I like this idea a lot! My time is often tied up doing other things (which often keeps me from posting often over here, for example) but I’d be interested! I won’t often be able to give prompt feedback but I do like the idea of having a workshop, which isn’t something I’ve really done in any formal way. I bookmarked your story and hopefully will get to it in the next few days.
I don’t know if you have any ideas about how to arrange and coordinate a workshop but I would be happy to join!
Also, in the interest of sharing writing, I’m serializing a novella this week with new chapters coming out each day. The final chapters will be out this Friday.
You can read the first two chapters.
Here’s the quick pitch:
Locke and Abe’s mother is rotting into their couch, along with everyone else’s parents. Locke grew up in the dusk country, an industrial wasteland forgotten by everyone and everything, including the sun, which only rises for a few hours of the day before leaving everything in twilight until true night falls. Those who still live in the dusk country spend their days scrabbling for bugs, competing in beetle battle tournaments, and finding ways to make it through one more day while everything rusts and rots around them.
Elsa, a girl with elk antlers, appears and falls into a torrid sexual affair with Abe. Locke’s jealousy and shame trap him in stasis as he dreams of a life beyond the dusk country, where people are happy and smiling, where people grow up and age. A promised land where love is real and the sun shines.
DUSK COUNTRY BLUES is a queer mix of Stephen King’s Stand By Me and Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
As for what I’ve been reading, I fell into a strange place of reading lots of children’s fiction. Part of this is because my son is now reading chapter books and part is because I wander the library with him and pick up books due to temporary whims.
The Spiderwick Chronicles are pretty good! The main series is five short books that tell a single story about siblings dealing with fairies and goblins and so on. There’s a sort of sidequel trilogy that I think is just not nearly as good.
I read four books of the Chronicles of Narnia before I ran out of patience. I think The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe is quite good but the other ones aren’t really.
Charmed Life by Diana Wynne Jones sounded very interesting so I thought I’d end up reading the whole series, but the first one was really enough for me. It’s a pleasant and enjoyable read with a surprisingly dark ending, but I didn’t really feel there was a need to continue on after.
The Guardians of Ga’Hoole was kind of similar. Fun and pleasant but I just couldn’t imagine reading more than the one book.
The Wizard of Oz is a delightfully strange book. Perhaps that’s no surprise. I read this one because my wife was desperate to see Wicked. We watched it a few nights before Christmas and then I read the Wizard of Oz Christmas Eve. And then I picked up the novel Wicked, which is also incredibly strange. Part of that strangeness comes from how different it is from the movie/musical. It’s absolutely bizarre that this novel became that movie since almost everything is different. I don’t know that I’d recommend the book, but it is fascinating to see how he rebuilt Oz and injected it with politics and religion that feels real and alive. In a lot of ways, it’s a novel about not doing something, which appeals to me but may be frustrating to most.
Ever since reading Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, I’ve been looking for something similar and failing to find it. Every book that gets recommended in listicles on the world wide web has been absolutely terrible to disappointing, so I’m not really sure what it is that I should look for but don’t go seeking it in When We Were Liars or The Cartographers or Bunny by Mona Awad or Catherine House.
I read the first two Shannara books by Terry Brooks because I was curious and I must say that they’re just not very good. In some ways they are very good, but I can’t really recommend them. I read the first two and began the third before I remembered that I don’t have to do things just because I had a bad idea.
I bought my wife Fourth Wing for Christmas because it’s all the rage and she swallowed it up and then the sequel too and has now preordered the third in the series, which comes out next week. She’s become a bit obsessed with it so I decided to pick it up because I keep picking up and dropping books after a few chapters. I can’t promise that I’ll finish it but as can be evidenced by these posts today: I read a lot of things I end up disliking. And so I may as well give this the old college try.
I am liking Blacktongue Thief by somebody–I could just look at the cover but who cares–and I’ve been enjoying it. I’m most of the way through it and I think he does a lot of clever things with what amounts to a very stupid premise. But he manages to make creatures like goblins into real monsters while also making magic feel wild and dangerous and full of awe and wonder.
San Francisco airport bookstore selling copies of capitalist realism
We got enough responses already to have a real go at this, so I want to bump this again for anyone who is writing or interested in writing. It’d be great to have as many people as we can.
Speaking for myself, the process of giving and receiving focused feedback has helped not only my writing but how I approach critique and improvement in general. And even at their worst, writing workshops are useful in helping you realize “well I certainly don’t want to write like that”
I haven’t really written anything in a long while but I really want to and if you’d have me I’ll gladly take the peer pressure as incentive to produce something rather than nothing.
How could we say no to you?
Onetti writes about the subjective and imaginative experience and deep interior life as arrayed against material reality, but not in an oppositional or ironic way. More that what people have to make greater meaning of and cope with the disappointments, confusions, and humiliations of life is a personal verging on hermetic mind, and in his fiction this force tends to be the greater even if by strategies of delusion and avoidance. The mind often wins, although to what degree and what end is ambiguous. El pozo establishes this theme in that Notes From Underground type format. The breakthrough effect in La vida breve is hazy and difficult to describe and I’ve been struggling a little to do so, so maybe it’s more sensible to present the raw mechanics:
The novel is about this 40 year old guy living in Buenos Aires named Brausen. He’s kind of just anhedonia-ing his way through life and clearly avoiding his money and familial problems. He works as an ad writer whose job is on the chopping block so he starts distracting himself by writing a screenplay. It’s a pretty aimless and uncinematic story about a physician named Diaz Grey who lives in an imaginary town called Santa María somewhere on the Rio Plate estuary. Brausen has a co-worker in the ad office named Onetti. Brausen gets up to some other stuff as well: starts creeping on a prostitute that lives in the neighboring apartment, but with her he pretends to be someone named Arce. His wife has a mastectomy and he apathetically loses his fading interest in their marriage, so she leaves him. He tries to move in on her sister. He gets fired and eventually runs out of money. He decides to kill his neighbor but when he enters her apartment he finds someone else has already done it first. Brausen, as Arce, helps this other man flee the city. Throughout the novel he imagines Díaz Grey in Santa María his interaction with a morphine-addict patient. Somehow, Brausen travels to Santa María, though it is unclear what happens to him in the end. Díaz Grey has an adventure that takes him to Buenos Aires.
The book was published in 1950 and thereafter Santa María became Onetti’s main setting and Díaz Grey one of his recurrent characters (iirc Brausen is only referenced by having a municipal fountain named after him or something). This arrangement is very intriguing to me. I guess it’s complicated as well but I think it’s truer to say it has genuinely strange and mysterious depth as a fictional conceit (even calling it that seems limiting). Santa María is often referred to as Onetti’s Yoknapatawpha which isn’t too far off - he was a real Faulkner head irl - but he has a distinct approach to it in that his dedication to the setting is highly variable: some works are more clearly situated in the social and cultural life of the town, while others are only obliquely positioned such that only dedicated close readers will notice it’s part of the Santa María setting. He’ll also take characters from fiction he wrote before La vida breve to Santa María like Larsen and I believe Nora from Tierra de nadie (1943). The persistent effect though is amorphous and changeable realism that feels hazy like a daydream, but like a daydream it can resolve into focus with concentration. A unique state in fiction in my experience it’s great. Hard to put into words though, hope I could convey some of it at least the thing I was talking about with a bound-together technical and thematic effect
anyway to keep it going I read his long short story/very short novella Tan triste como ella (another good title) and I found it pretty incredible. I would recommend it with the caveat that it’s upsetting and has some content warning style stuff. Not a huge time commitment and has genuinely strange and moving parts
edit : looks like the Silver translation is on the internet for free
I thought airports only sold Atomics Habits and The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck*
in SFO it’s a branch of green Apple Books. Pretty great selection actually. Believe it or not you passed through my mind briefly because I think you’re from the bay(?) and they had a copy of that babitz and Didion book on display…just two girls on a coin the industry loves to spin
it’s currently on my bedside table :)
And yes, I’m from the Bay and fly out of SFO pretty regularly. They do have the best airport bookstores I’ve been able to find!
