What's On Your Bookshelf?: Titanium Court's AP Thomson

Hello Reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to What's On Your Bookshelf? - Jank's twice monthly chat with a selection of game makers about books. Upon first playing Titanium Court, I believe I described it as "like falling through a back-alley door into a secret vaudeville performed by tiny glowing ants". Also probably something about how funny it was - ants being the famous bores they are, I imagine I would have needed to modify the simile. Either way, it's only AP Thomson! Cheers AP! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

What are you currently reading?

2666 by Roberto Bolaño (and translated from Spanish to English by Natasha Wimmer). I overheard someone recommend this book so I bought it and started reading it with no clue what it was about. It's a great book for that (and in general)!

The thing about this book is the prose is very digestible. It's easy and conversational, pulling you along at a compelling pace, introducing you to its characters and entangling you with their desires. Then suddenly you realize that, within the text, a person has begun telling a story, and that story has completely subsumed the original story, and then someone within that new story begins telling another story, and that story grows, and you look around you and you aren't sure how you got here or what's going on, and it all creeps up on you because the straightforward prose has been pulling you along so so gently. But then, just as gently, you return to the main thread, which seems to be tracing a spiraling shape towards some kind of unseen center. Good stuff.

What did you last read?

Most recently, I finished up a re-read of the Lord of the Rings while reading along with Shelved by Genre (an excellent podcast for fans of genre fiction or podcasts) as they do their year long unit on Tolkien. I wasn't initially excited about re-reading it, mostly because I've grown pretty weary of the Tolkien-inspired dominant strain of fantasy, but I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the original is considerably weirder than its copycats. What struck me in particular during this re-read was the overwhelming melancholy of the story, something that apparently went mostly over my head the first time I read it (i.e. 5th grade lol).

I also recently read Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, which is great, but I bring it up mostly to talk about how my ebook edition had a pretty wild misprint. Basically, at a certain key moment in the early plot, it suddenly seemed like the protagonist was making some pretty grand assumptions based on very little evidence. I was like "did I miss something? This doesn't make sense without some kind of additional detail." Apologies to Mrs. Shelley, but I initially wrote it off as sloppy writing. Lo and behold, when I reach the end of the book (at 60% of the way through according to my ebook app) the words "The End" were immediately followed by more text in a totally different font. Reading this new section, I slowly realized it was the second half of chapter 7, providing the exact details that felt like they were missing during my initial read. Then the rest of the book following chapter 7 was also printed in this new font, so I could read it all again, if I wanted.

How strange. I probably should have just downloaded a public domain copy for free rather than paying $2.99 for whatever happened there.