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! Three weeks! Three weeks is all it took before Booked For The Week patron saint Gene Wolfe got mentioned again. Welcome back Gene. It’s like you never left.
This week, it’s Inkle’s Jon Ingold! Cheers Jon! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
What are you currently reading?
I have a nasty habit of starting more books than I finish by some order of magnitude, so I’m currently in the middle of about eight books. Most recently, and most likely to get finished, is A Gun For Sale by Graham Greene. I love Greene’s writing – he’s spare, and vicious, and funny – but sometimes you get the sense that he’s writing about the first thing that came into his head that morning, and Gun feels a bit like that. It’s a compelling idea – written from the point of view of the most unattractive, uncompelling hitman who’s just done a political murder, a sort of anti-Bond – and you just know the noose will tighten around him with inexorable certainty – but by the end, I’ll be devastated and Greene will just move on to his next one, unfussed. Bastard.
Least likely to get finished is Michael Moorcock’s Dancers At Rhe End Of Time: I’m always trying to read Moorcock because I quite like wacky 70s scifi, but I always get the sense that he couldn’t care less what he’s writing and it’s just words following other words, with no design or intention. I do keep trying, though.
What did you last read?
The Last Murder At The End Of the World, by Stuart Turton. I tend to find that books are either slow and memorable or fast and forgettable, and this was the second kind, but I enjoyed my time with it. It’s probably the most cheerful post-apocalyptic murder story I’ve ever read: the body count is colossal but the thing is set on a sun-drenched Greek island; it mostly feels peaceful and chill.
I also re-read In Green’s Jungles, which is a Gene Wolfe book from the middle of a trilogy (The Book Of The Short Sun) which follows from a quadrilogy (The Book Of The Long Sun), and so is hard to recommend in isolation, but it’s extraordinary. Wolfe’s line by line writing is unparalleled, his plotting is subtle and unflinchingly intelligent, and his politics veer between sharp and compassionate and, er, weirdly awful. Green is magnificent; it’s constantly layering and unlayering different levels of storytelling, in consequential and purposeful ways (adventures inside dreams inside stories inside memoirs.) In general, his books never allow their written nature to become invisible, and they are infinitely better for it. Slow and memorable.
What are you eyeing up next?
On my desk is The Necropolis Railway, by Jim Stringer, about a London underground line used to transport dead bodies set in 1903. I lived in London for a few years and the underground always made me think of Charon the ferryman, and I’m hoping the book captures the sepulchral nature of a railway beneath a city. Next to it is everyone’s favourite stocking-filler, Orbital, which is poetic but didn’t grip me when I read the first chapter.
What quote or scene from a book sticks with you the most?
That’s really difficult! Probably the end of The Once and Future King by T.H. White, which is a strange and old-fashioned book that retells the legend of King Arthur, from his boyhood adventures through setting up the Round Table to everything falling apart. On the eve of the final battle, Arthur is sitting in his tent, remembering the time his tutor Merlyn turned him into a goose, and reflecting that if people could fly they would realise that borders weren’t real; and if only people would start thinking, instead of reacting, they might stop fighting. But it’s still hopeful. The Round Table – supposed to stand for togetherness and the use of might for good – has come apart at the hands of a lying, manipulative, jealous, power-hungry few. But Arthur knows that even though he will die and the country will fall into darkness, the idea of a Round Table will survive, and that is enough. White was writing in 1940, but Fascism is a weed.
What book do you find yourself bothering friends to read?
Depends on the friend! But if you asked my friends, they’d all roll their eyes and say “something by Gene Wolfe”, and that would be fair. I probably recommend “Peace” the most – it’s about a man remembering and retelling his life, except sometimes he changes what happens, and he’s probably already dead, and there’s a guy who turns into stone, and did the narrator in fact murder quite a lot of people? It’s unclear, and he’s definitely not going to tell you. It’s fantastic: a little like a Paul Auster novel, only with a more fantastical bent.
What book would you like to see someone adapt to a game?
The Big Sleep. Detective games are in right now, but Raymond Chandler’s detective is special, because he’s noble, honourable, and constantly getting kidnapped, knocked out, drugged, lost, drunk, punched and generally abused. He’s more like Indiana Jones than Sherlock Holmes. He roams the city following clues in the loosest sense, but he never fails to be dour about it. There’s plenty of deduction games where the detective is totally absent, and a bunch of adventure games about noir detectives (though they often seem to involve animals for some reason?) – but I want to see something in glorious black and white, with drawling voice-overs, where you lose every fist fight you get into. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone quite nail it.
Or else, Don Quixote, which is legitimately hilarious. Like Elden Ring, except you’re an old guy wearing a coal scuttle for a breastplate and carrying a broom handle for a spear, and your enemies are all windmills and funny-looking trees, and no one you rescue ever wants to be rescued.
Would it be cheating at this point to backtrack on this column’s very secret goal of having the guests name every book ever written? Every Gene Wolfe book ever written is still a hefty ask, but it’s starting to feel much more manageable. Something to ponder until next week’s failure of an every-book-namer, then. Book for now!
