What I'm playing/reading/etc.
Not to promise too much, but I should have an announcement about a new feature coming to the paid subscription section next week. As always, toss me an email at [email protected] if you want to enter the Luxury Corridors but a subscription would be a hardship for you: I’ll hook you up. Or message me on Substack, if that’s a thing you can do. I’ll figure it out: together, we will find a way.
Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition
I’m hoping to write a longer piece about this game, because I think it (and the Xeno series in general) is really interesting; suffice it to say for now that it’s very fun. The *Xenoblade *series’ combat is famously MMO-ish: aggro and positioning and a balanced party composition are very important; your various abilities are on individual cooldowns which, when triggered, generally take a beat or two to execute. I like XC2 and 3’s combat more on balance, but there is something satisfying about XC:DE’s particular jankiness, especially in combination with the world’s design—all of these very distinct biomes, each of which has a recognizable-but-unique set of side quests that facilitate getting you into out-of-the-way corners of the map: none of this is unique to MMOs, of course, but XC:DE gave me occasional flashes of the particular exploratory feeling I associate with early World of Warcraft. It’s fun. More soon, hopefully.
(Frank Black voice) I’ve got a metal face
*We are all completely beside ourselves *– Karen Joy Fowler
I really liked this. A vivid and playful rendering of some of stuff I think about a lot—the relationship between animals and humans, psychological formation, memory, Living in a Society, etc.—from an original and intimidatingly emotionally complex angle: it’s a sort of explicitly retrospective first-person bildungsroman about growing up alongside a chimpanzee.
The voice is inviting and open and elusive, chatty and circuitous in a way that is, I think, deceptively tricky for a writer to pull off. For example, the stuff about the narrator’s chimpanzee sister is the heart of the book—it is what the book is, in a fundamental sense, about—and, because it’s an attention-grabbing conceit, it’s what the back of the book talks about, etc. But we don’t really get into that all until the book’s second half. (It’s the kind of thing that makes me wonder what the book would be like if it weren’t framed by publishers and marketers. The NYT review starts with an injunction not to read the back of the book. I prefer doing this—I actually taped an index card over my copy of The Red and the Black when I read it. Chill book. But I’ve already ruined We are all completely beside ourselves for you. Sorry! )
This displacement is in service of one of its most moving and thoroughly realized insights, which is the thorny elusiveness of memory: the fact that it takes effort to work back to those events and relationships in our lives which shaped us, and that we might not ever really get there—and that, even if we do, we might not come to understand them in the same way as those who were there with us. Anyway, I liked it a lot. I kind of wish the title were fully capitalized, but that’s okay.
Who the hell is the Booker Man anyway
Lady Joker, Vol. 1 – Kaoru Takamura
It feels like I’ve been reading this book for forever, somehow. I picked it up randomly at a bookstore and tried to read it last winter, but school got in the way; here I am, finally finishing…the first volume. Anyway: a richly textured and occasionally tedious riff on a real kidnapping case in 1980s Japan. Part of the appeal of the situation is, without giving too much away (though can you spoil something based on real life? I’m reminded of the caller to the Charlotte radio show I heard as a child who was mad because the hosts spoiled Valkyrie, a movie about the failed assassination of Hitler), that the suspense of the case is somewhat displaced — it’s far more about the build-up to and aftermath of the kidnapping. Lots of great psychological stuff and intricate detail about, like, various fraudulent financial schemes and so on.
I feel kind of like a little baby whining about the extremely intricate and narratively essential web of detail the book weaves—I’ve actually learned sort of a lot from the book!—but I must confess that I have found it frequently slow going: I have taken many breaks from it. That said: I’ve been really into it when I’m stoned. It turns out that the minutiae of mid-90s Japanese newspaper bureaucracy really blows my mind two hours into an edible. Set and setting, I guess.
I play my lady music in the sun
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