Category: books

My Year in Reading: 2014 (and 2013, too)

I was wondering why I didn’t write a year-end recap of the books I read last year, and then I remembered:  oh yeah, I had a baby, and you don’t read books when you have a brand-new baby.  How can you read when you don’t sleep, you barely eat, and any free time you do manage to carve out is usually at work?  And reading on the subway is super difficult for me, given that the subway engineer on my evening commute makes a habit of loudly narrating pretty much every single inch of track with inane Subway 101 tips and tricks, making it impossible to concentrate on anything else unless I have headphones on.

That being said, I still kept track of what I read last year in a GoogleDoc spreadsheet because this is what I do, and, well, yeah:  I only finished 6 books last year – 7 if you include my quasi-annual re-read of Infinite Jest (my 8th or 9th time through, but 1st time in e-book format, which is far preferable when you’re on the go).  It was an embarrassingly low number for me, even if I had a pretty good excuse.

Still, in the interest of maintaining the historical record, these are the books that I read in 2013, in rough chronological order:

The Way of Kings (Stormlight Archive 1), Brandon Sanderson
I’m not a big fantasy reader, but this had been recommended by enough people over the years that I felt compelled to give it a shot, and what do you know – I was immediately taken with it.  Sanderson is absurdly prolific, as you’ll see below.

Tenth of December, George Saunders
I’m also not necessarily a reader of short stories; I generally prefer gigantic novels.  But, again, Saunders had been recommended and highly reviewed, and this New York Times profile was an incredible read in and of itself, and I picked this up and quickly devoured it…

Pastoralia, George Saunders
…and then devoured this as well.  I would’ve continued down the Saunders rabbit hole but I didn’t want to burn out on him, and so I stopped myself from buying his other books, but they’re most certainly on my to-do list.

The Mistborn Trilogy, Brandon Sanderson
Like I said above, Sanderson is ridiculously prolific.  This is but one of many gigantic trilogies he’s written, and part of what’s so astounding about him is that while these books are literally humongous, he’s still quite marvelous at world building and character work and making sure you never feel lost.

NOS4A2, Joe Hill
I’d read a few of the stories in 20th Century Ghosts and decided I wanted to read him in a longer format, and this happened to come out right when this urge was reaching a fevered pitch.  I think the first 2 thirds of this book are quite stunning, and certainly reminiscent of his father’s work; unfortunately, it fell apart for me a little bit at the end.

Night Film, Marisha Pessl
I was a huge fan of her first book, Strange Topics in Calamity Physics, and had very high hopes for this one; perhaps my expectations were too high, though, because this one never came together for me, and I found the ending quite bland.

Bleeding Edge, Thomas Pynchon
Curiously, I didn’t give this a grade in my spreadsheet.  I’m not sure I enjoyed it very much, though I was certainly surprised at how super-aware and knowledgeable he is about popular culture.  In any event, books about 9/11 are still tough for me to read, and I’m not sure that’s ever going to change.

I picked up the slack big-time in 2014, I’m happy to say; I finished 22 books, and I feel certain that I’m going to finish my 23rd by the end of next week.

The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt
Normally I read rather quickly, but not so here; this took me forever to get through.  I started it in mid-December of ’13, and if Goodreads is to be believed, I didn’t finish it until March of ’14.  That’s absurd.  As for the book itself; there’s no denying that Tartt is astonishingly talented, and that her characters are memorable and real, but I found the pacing very slow and I feel a little bit like the main character got let off the hook at the end – even though I also felt that he’d suffered through some very bad luck.

Words of Radiance: Stormlight Archive 2, Brandon Sanderson
Another huge book, but I finished this in a matter of weeks, and I’m sure I’ll read the first two volumes again to get caught up for volume 3 (even though he does a terrific job of getting you up to speed).

Lexicon, Max Barry
I read this over the course of our first family vacation, and found it intoxicating.  A sci-fi concept where language can be used as weaponry, and “poets” are trained by a highly secretive organization.  Two converging narratives with an absolutely stunning and moving reveal.

Pioneer Detectives, Konstantin Kakaes
Spoiler alert: “one of the greatest scientific mysteries of our time” is not, in fact, all that mysterious after all.  An entertaining read, to be sure, but also a bit of a let down.

Niceville
The Homecoming (Niceville 2), Carsten Stroud
I was in the mood for a pulpy supernatural thriller, and these two fit the bill quite well.  Part 3 is slated to come out next summer; I’m not sure it’ll be on my list, but these were interesting.

Heart-Shaped Box, Joe Hill
Boy oh boy, this was absolutely one of the creepiest ghost stories I’ve ever read.

Lies of Locke Lamora (Gentlemen Bastards 1)
Red Seas under Red Skies (Gentlemen Bastards 2)
Republic of Thieves (Gentlemen Bastards 3), Scott Lynch
I wish I could remember who it was on Twitter that first brought these to my attention – whoever you are, you have my eternal thanks.  The easiest way to explain these books is as Ocean’s Eleven set in a vaguely steampunk world, except where everything turns to shit pretty much all the time, and where “success” doesn’t always mean “a big score”, but rather “not dying horribly.”

Declare, Tim Powers
I am and have always been fascinated with secret societies and hidden, occult-ish mysteries, and putting that sort of ethos inside of a Cold War spy novel is pretty much a win-win.

The Secret Place, Tana French
I’ve been a fan of the Dublin Murder Squad since the very first one, though each subsequent novel has been a little more disappointing than the previous one.  I’m happy to say, then, that this one was a lot more enjoyable than the last few, and I’m curious to know where she goes in further volumes now that she’s introduced a subtle element of the supernatural into the proceedings.  The earlier books never had it, and instead their hook was really just about how hard the ending could punch you in the stomach.  This was not a gut-puncher to that sort of degree, but it was still a good read.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, David Shafer
Having just finished watching all six episodes of Black Mirror, I feel very much like this book could exist in that sort of universe, a universe where one private corporation is attempting to become the uber-Facebook with serious sinister implications and an underground resistance is attempting to hack their way into destroying it.

Wolf in White Van, John Darnielle
I’m not at all familiar with Darnielle’s band, Mountain Goats, but I’d certainly read a volume of his collected lyrics; the man clearly has a way with words.  This is a deeply beautiful meditation on loneliness, with an ending that left me speechless.

The Bone Clocks, David Mitchell
This is my book of the year, without question.  I wrote up a thing about it here.  I want to read it again, but I also want to read The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet first.

Annihilation (Southern Reach Trilogy 1)
Authority (Southern Reach Trilogy 2)
Acceptance (Southern Reach Trilogy 3), Jeff VanderMeer
The first book is a knockout; the second is somewhat of a letdown, though it expands on the first book’s backstory in rather significant ways; the third book is an attempt to reconcile the first two, answering certain questions while raising even more.  I’m not entirely sure that the trilogy is a successful one, but the first book is so incredibly good that you might as well give it a go.

Slow Regard of Silent Things, Patrick Rothfuss
This is a small side-story to the larger Kingkiller Chronicles trilogy, and it feels very much like an experiment in tone and structure and character development, but it’s also a rather beautiful read.  Rothfuss himself warns you that you might not like it in the preface, and I suppose that’s true if this is your first introduction to his work; but if you’ve read the first two proper books and are eager for anything more, this is more or less mandatory.

The Confabulist, Steven Galloway
A historical mystery novel that is somewhat reminiscent of Carter Beats the Devil, though not nearly as much fun as that book.  Still, it’s an intriguing premise – the memoirs of the man who killed Houdini (twice), and the ending is surprisingly affecting.

Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel
I feel bad that I didn’t enjoy this as much as everyone else seems to be; perhaps I’d just had my fill of post-apocalypse dystopia (especially since the final chapter of Bone Clocks is so shockingly devastating on that particular front).  It’s very well written, and the various threads in both present and past are woven quite delicately; I’m just not sure they worked for me.

Teatro Grottesco, Thomas Ligotti
I’m still in the middle of this one, and I’m enjoying it quite thoroughly.  Ligotti’s reputation is that of a modern-day Lovecraft or Poe; all of his stories take place in the fog in desolate towns, and which are shadowed by unsettling… things, and there’s a philosophical weariness and uneasiness in his narrators that creates a powerful and quite nerve-rattling sense of dread.  I’ll be looking forward to reading more of him, though I’ll definitely need a palate cleanser before I do.

Failure, And Moving On

I turn 39 on Monday.  And as such, I’m feeling particularly reflective and ruminative today, with all the attendant melancholy that such navel-gazing generally brings.

This is probably as good a time as any to mention that I failed this year’s NaNoWriMo, and it was a pretty spectacular failure – I think I topped out at just under 7,000 words.  What started as a memoir-ish chronicle of a person I used to know ended up with a deep dive into my college journal and an inadvertent re-opening of a lot of old wounds that I thought I’d closed, and so I’m in this weird paralytic state where I can’t finish the project because I desperately want to reach out to people that I’ve lost, all the while knowing that some of those people probably don’t want anything to do with me.

I was emailing with an old friend yesterday about this:

I get hung up on a lot of stuff in my past, which sucks, because aside from [one specific thing that I’m redacting for purposes of this public blog] I’m very much in love with my present.  But the thing is, I still recognize a lot of my darker moments in my journal, and that’s the part that’s disconcerting, because it would appear that I haven’t changed nearly as much as I think I have.

So anyway, there’s that.

On the gaming front, this weekend is primarily focused on progressing through Dragon Age Inquisition, and I suspect that’ll be the case until I’m done with it.  If I need a break, I’ll go back to Assassin’s Creed Unity, because (a) I hate myself and (b) I’m almost done with the campaign.

On the TV front – and yes, every once a while I watch TV – the wife and I watched the first two episodes of Black Mirror on Netflix last night, and holy shit that show is incredible.  The Brits know how to make really good TV, people, that’s the lesson to be learned here.

I finished reading Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven last night; I liked it, but it was the third post-apocalyptic novel I’d read in a row, and so as such I was probably a little burned out on the subject matter.  I’ve since started Thomas Ligotti’s Teatro Grottesco, which is really creepy and unnerving and good.  I came across his name the other day in a piece about True Detective and plagiarism; I haven’t watched the show but I’d obviously heard a lot about it, and Ligotti’s work is cited quite often as a direct influence on the show.  So I figured, hey, why not.

I’m not necessarily done with this just yet, but I figure I might as well start putting it out – here’s my Favorite Songs of 2014 playlist.

[spotify https://play.spotify.com/user/jervonyc/playlist/1qUgxbGW7oZehDejNwFsUk]

Stuffed

Capture

You may or may not have noticed that I keep a widget of what I’m currently playing.  I do my best to keep it accurate and timely, though sometimes I miss a few things here and there.  In any event, I’m marking this specific moment in time here because, if for some strange reason you’re reading this particular post in future weeks/months, it won’t look like that.  The current rotation widget may not look like that ever again.  Such a thing is simply unsustainable, because (i) unless I’m suddenly unemployed and (ii) I am also no longer required to be a parent, there can be no time to play all these games, and (iii) if everything in (i) and (ii) is (god forbid) true, then there’s certainly no money to purchase them.

More than that:  having this sort of to-do list is incredibly intimidating, and we’re not even taking into account my Steam backlog.   I’ve spoken before of the weird need to be part of the conversation, or to at least to have an understanding of what the current conversation is about, and this pathological need to be “up” on as many possible games as my brain can allow is basically a recipe for disappointment.  In my mad rush to dip my toes into all of these games, I’m resistant to letting myself get sucked into any particular one, and so I’m not having nearly as much fun with the fall blockbuster releases as I’d like.

I used to be this way with music.  I’d go to the record store and buy 5-10 CDs all at once (I realize that there might be some of you who are totally unfamiliar with this experience, and for that I pity you – to be fair, I also did this same sort of binging on iTunes and Amazon MP3) and listen to them all, only eventually sticking with the one that I liked the most.   It took two things to get me to stop acting this way:  the first was the realization that taste-making sites like Pitchfork, which I’d been relying upon since a few months after it launched, were no longer in sync with my own personal tastes (this 6.6 for the self-titled Forms album, for example – one of my favorite albums of all time – was the final straw), and the second was Spotify, which I was more than happy to spend $10/month on, considering how much listening I was doing (and continue to do).  (And yes, I do wish Spotify would modify their method of distributing revenue to artists – this Medium article has a much fairer and better approach.)  I still devour new albums and catch up on older ones I’ve missed, but I’m no longer putting self-applied pressure to absorb them into my bloodstream as quickly as possible.

I do still binge on books, but I can only read one thing at a time.  I have a good friend who’s constantly reading 2-3 books at once (while also writing her own novel and poetry), and I have no idea how her brain doesn’t explode.  As far as books go, though, the idea of a book backlog is comforting as opposed to intimidating; I generally read rather quickly, so I know I can get to stuff, but I also like knowing that I have a new book for nearly any mood that might strike.

Games, though… there’s this pressure to play them all, as soon as possible, and the pressure comes from all different angles.  If you’re into multiplayer, you more or less have to start from Day One – I just bought an Xbox One but I can’t possibly imagine jumping into Titanfall right now, since none of my friends are still playing it and I’d have to guess that only the hardest of hard-core fans are still around, which also implies that there’s absolutely no possibility for survival for a noob.  On the flip side, if you’re into single-player, you have to start early, too, so that you’re not accidentally spoiler’d.

There’s also the long-term pressure of simply staying current with the hardware you’re using.  If I’d never gotten around to playing, say, Red Dead Redemption, I’d be totally screwed now – my PS3 is in our bedroom, and my 360 is basically dead.  Sure, the PC is a bit better in terms of legacy titles, but by the same token – why would I want to start Baldur’s Gate 2 right now when I could instead start Divinity: Original Sin, which is itself already a few months old by this point?  And why would I play either of those when I have Dragon Age Inquisition on my PS4 right this very minute?

At some point I know I’ll get over this pressure to be on top of everything, especially since I’m currently under no professional obligations to actually be on top of everything.  But in the meantime, it’s driving me insane.  I think I said this yesterday – wanting to play all these games at the same time means I can’t actually allow myself to get sucked in to any of them.  I was telling a friend this morning – playing the new GTA V right now is an exercise in absurdity, because I’m too used to the first-person controls of Far Cry 4 to be able to deal with the changes in GTA’s 1st person scheme (even if you can change them), and similarly I’ve got Assassin’s Creed Unity in my fingers, which makes moving in GTA’s 3rd person scheme tricky, too (I keep hitting R2 to run, and I end up punching people in the face).  And having all three of those games in my hands means that the aforementioned Dragon Age Inquisition – the one game I genuinely want to play more than any of these others – is basically impossible.

In that list above you’ll also notice I’m currently playing Rollers of the Realm.  It’s a pinball/RPG hybrid, and it’s on the Vita, and it’s everything you could ever want a pinball/RPG hybrid to be.  (Here, let Kotaku’s Leo Wichtowski tell you about it.)  I played it during this morning’s commute and was charmed immensely; the dialogue is unexpectedly sharp and well-written thus far, but the pinball itself is solid and fun, and will be my go-to commute game for the foreseeable future.

I don’t know if this is true for all Vita owners or if it’s just my own particular experience, but my Vita’s download speeds are so ridiculously slow that it defies logic and reason.  Rollers of the Realm is 350 MB.  I started downloading it at 8:00 pm last night.  It didn’t finish until 7:00 this morning.  That’s 11 hours to download 350 MB.  The only reason why a 350 MB download should take 11 hours is because the current year is 1997.

Analysis / Paralysis

I knew this would happen; I’d be unable to choose between Far Cry 4 and Dragon Age Inquisition while still keeping Assassin’s Creed Unity and Forza Horizon 2 in the rotation (side note – originally typed that as Forizon, and I might end up keeping that for shorthand purposes) with periodic messings-about in GTA V and Sunset Overdrive.  And so I kinda just move from one to the other, primarily spending an hour each with both Far Cry and Dragon Age, and those specific two games are so completely different that my brain ends up getting scrambled.

What can I offer in the way of impressions?  Hmm.  After 90 minutes with Far Cry 4, it is essentially Far Cry 3 in a new locale, and while that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s not necessarily a new thing.  FC3 felt new and refreshing and daring, and 4 is essentially a refinement of what worked in 3 with a better-looking engine, an absurdly charismatic villain, and a player character so bland and uninteresting that I’d forget his name if everyone in the game didn’t constantly gasp with amazement when I walked into a room.  It’s more of the same, but what made FC3 so good (relatively speaking) was how surprisingly vital it felt, how clearly it was designed with a purpose.  Sure, I’m still very early, and I’m already in an especially cynical mood, but thus far in my time with it FC4’s primary purpose for existing seems to be so that Ubisoft can say they had a robust and diverse holiday release calendar.  This is not to say that FC4 isn’t strikingly pretty, or even fun – it is both of those things – but it’s also relatively mindless, which is a disappointment.

Dragon Age, on the other hand, feels absolutely vital, lovingly crafted and cared for and built by a team that has something to prove, to make up for DA2’s inadequacies and the original’s limited reach.  So that’s wonderful!  BUT: it feels awfully weird in my hands.  This is not necessarily DA’s fault, of course – I’ve still got the Assassin’s Creed Unity controls scheme very much in my fingers, and so every third-person experience is going to take some getting used to (this is also true of my time with GTA V, a game that I’ve already spend 50+ hours with).  That said, BioWare RPGs are almost always magnificent experiences that have kinda clunky combat, and so there’s some precedent here.  Once I decide to remain focused on it, and only it, I suspect I’ll get over my clumsiness quickly.

In BOOKS:  I finished Steven Galloway’s “The Confabulist” yesterday, which is a book I’m not even sure I knew about until just a few days ago.  It presents itself as a magician’s odyssey, the intertwining tales of Harry Houdini and the man who killed him “twice”.  I expected it to feel much like Glen David Gold’s splendid “Carter Beats the Devil”, a similar story about magicians in the early 1900s.  Instead, it’s a book about memory, loss, loneliness and regret, and so while I might have been disappointed that I didn’t get the adventure/mystery I’d thought I was getting, I ended up relating a lot more strongly than I anticipated to the “killer”, Martin Strauss.   Galloway’s prose is unremarkable, and yet in its plainness there are some moving passages that resonated very strongly with me (particularly in light of my own recent bout of memory-induced panic/regret):

It’s inexplicable what causes a person to love someone. It is a feeling so irrational that it allows you to believe that the person you love has qualities they don’t actually possess. And when someone loves you back, it’s nearly impossible not to feel you must never let them see what you are really like, because you know deep inside that you are not worthy of their love.

…

We talked in a roundabout way about nothing in particular: school, people we knew, things we liked and didn’t like. It was the sort of conversation people who haven’t known each other long but understand they will have many more conversations have, uncomplicated and almost lazy but also anticipatory.

…

What do you do when the best you have is not very good? I had always been paralyzed by my own inadequacy.

…

Being a parent is a monumental thing. You shape reality for another person. You cannot be an illusion. You cannot be paralyzed by the fear that you are an illusion. If you have done a bad job, or no job at all, what remains of you is proof that the world is an unfeeling place. If you have done a good job, what remains is the part of you that was magical.

It’s not the sort of must-have book that I’d heartily and eagerly recommend, but it’s certainly an interesting way to spend a few days, and I found myself unexpectedly moved by a reveal that I even sorta saw coming at a certain point.

In Which A Whole Bunch of Navel-Gazing Ensues

1.  My rental copy of Assassin’s Creed Unity has not yet arrived – it might come tonight, it might come tomorrow – and yet considering the spectacular number of glitches and game-crashing bugs that are dominating my Twitter feed, I’m not sure I want to start it until the first wave of patches arrive (and that those patches don’t further break the game).  And by that point, when enough patches have come out so that the game is in a playable state, I could very well be knee-deep in Dragon Age Inquisition and might not want to bother.  The larger problem is that the code isn’t the only thing that appears to be half-baked; Assassin’s Creed games have always been tough nuts to crack from a narrative point of view, and I keep hearing that Unity’s story is bland, boring and nonsensically enigmatic, the way it’s always been.  No amount of patching can fix a busted story.  Do I want to spend 40+ hours of my life wrestling with something this problematic?  I mean, I’ve played pretty much every AC game there is (except the Vita game and Rogue) but I haven’t been afraid to leave them unfinished (i.e., Revelations, AC3).

Furthermore, regarding Ubisoft’s actions with respect to Unity’s release – specifically, the bizarre 12-hour post-release review embargo – well, it smacks of bullshit and corporate shenanigans, a desperate flailing to reduce the number of cancelled pre-orders once the word got out that Unity was straight-up broken.  And considering how the pre-release hype failed to live up to the post-release reality of Watch Dogs, I can’t help but feel very nervous about Far Cry 4.

2.  And speaking of broken stuff, I must admit that I’ve stalled a bit on my NaNo project.  Honestly?  The subject matter started sending me into a very inward-facing, navel-gazing spiral of depression – which was exacerbated by re-reading my college diary – and so I’ve been mired in this weird melancholic funk of nostalgia and regret for the last week (which itself has been exacerbated by a nasty cold that my family has been passing around to each other for the last month or so, as well as some day-job-related stress that I can’t talk about here).  Indeed, this morning I listened to the first half of Marc Maron’s WTF interview with Allie Brosh (of Hyperbole and a Half fame) and what I heard hit me square in the face.  I go through these depressive cycles every once in a while, and they’re a real pain in the ass; I get apathetic, and then I get mad at myself for being apathetic, and then I get mad that I’d rather get mad at myself than stop being apathetic, and so on and so forth.  So, yeah – writing about one of my college friends and collaborators has turned into something a bit uglier.  That doesn’t mean I intend to give up on it, though; it means that I need to approach it in a different way.

3.  Switching back over to games: I beg your forgiveness for all the Xbox One bashing I’ve done this year.  I’ve been playing Sunset Overdrive and Forza Horizon 2 just about every night since I bought the damned thing, and I’ve become rather enamored with it.  So much so that I haven’t decided which platform to play Dragon Age on; frankly, I’m waiting for the Digital Foundry people to get their hands on it (especially once the PS4 patch is in place that supposedly fixes a lot of what was broken during the review period).  Because unless the PS4 version is noticeably and markedly better-looking and performing, I might just stick with the XB1 – even though I have a $15 credit on the PSN store.

4.  And now switching back to books:  I’m trying to keep my good-book-reading streak alive, and so I’m still trying to figure out what to read next.  In addition to the list of 10 as-yet-unpurchased books I put up the other day (as well as the countless already-purchased-and-still-unread books on my Kindle), I’m now tremendously intrigued by Michel Faber, who I’d never heard of until yesterday, when I flipped through this week’s New Yorker and saw his newest book mentioned in their Briefly Noted section.  David Mitchell, writer of this year’s “Bone Clocks” (which is my personal Book of the Year and might end up in my all-time Top 10), calls Faber’s new book “his second masterpiece”, and so I had to find out what the first masterpiece was, which is “The Crimson Petal and the White”, which a few Facebook friends also raved about; and it turns out that he also wrote “Under the Skin”, which is also a movie I’ve been wanting to see all year.  So, then:  if you’ve got anything to say about him, please let me know.

The To-Read Pile

Seeking opinions on the following books, all on my to-read-but-haven’t-yet-purchased file:

1. Orfeo, Richard Powers
2. Dhalgren, Samuel Delaney
3. Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, Javier Marias (finally on Kindle!)
4. Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel
5. Mr. Gwyn, Alessandro Baricco
6. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, Anthony Marra
7. The Last Policeman trilogy, Ben Winters
8. The Three, Sarah Lotz
9. anything by László Krasznahorka
10. The Gone-Away World, Nick Harkaway 

Adventures in Excessive Hyperbole: Forza Horizon 2

Actually, before we get to Forza Horizon 2, there’s three things on my mind that I should get out of the way first:

1.  I’m currently at just under 7400 words for NaNoWriMo.  As I’d mentioned last week, the topic that I eventually wound my way towards is somewhat emotionally charged, and at this point I really don’t care about hitting 50,000 words; I’m mostly just heavily invested in figuring the thing out.  And it’s hard to carve out time to sit and write about stuff that keeps hitting me harder than I expect it to; it’s tough to come home from work and do that when I’m already exhausted, and it’s even more difficult to find time during the day to do it, when I’m expected to be professional and not, say, an emotional wreck (as was the case last Friday).

2.  I tried giving it the benefit of the doubt, but after wading through 2 1/2 missions of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, I realized I’d had enough.  Because I don’t care about, and totally suck at, the multiplayer side of things, I was only ever going to play their campaigns.  And the campaigns have always been a bit silly and convoluted and contrived (and I’m not even talking about “Press X to Pay Your Respects”, although that’s a perfect example of something silly and convoluted and contrived).  As far as CoD:AW goes, I appreciate that it’s going for this sci-fi not-quite-near-future vibe, giving me quasi-superpowers and such… but at the end of the day it still feels like it’s always felt, which is a very tightly scripted shoot-em-up gauntlet running through blandly pretty corridors.   I don’t play enough Call of Duty to have an already-intuitive grasp of the controls, which makes the campaign trickier than it should be; I try to melee someone and end up throwing a grenade.  There is clearly an audience for Call of Duty, and I might as well come to grips with the fact that I am clearly not it, and haven’t been it for quite a long time now.  (For the record: my 2014 shooter of the year is still Wolfenstein, and that means Far Cry 4 has a very high bar to meet.)

3.  I finished Patrick Rothfuss’ “The Slow Regard of Silent Things“, a slim side-story to the Kingkiller Chronicles.  As Rothfuss himself says, it’s not the book you should start with if you’re new to his work.  I enjoyed it; it’s a bit of an experiment for him, which he fully acknowledges in his afterword, and I think he succeeded rather well.  The book features no dialogue, and only one character, and it does not explain itself – and yet, at the book’s end, you know this character incredibly well, and you’re given a very interesting, very specific slice of the world of the larger two books that you’d never see otherwise, and it gives him an opportunity to be more playful with language than he usually gets.  I’d recommend it – but, again, only if you’ve read the first two books, and only if you’re aware that you’re not reading a “traditional” story.  To say any more would ruin the book’s magical, ethereal quality; that’s something you should experience as nakedly as possible.

Long-time readers of this site (the number of which can probably be counted on one hand) will know that I am prone to excessive use of hyperbole.  I make no apologies for this tic; it is what it is.  When I feel inclined to write about something, it’s most likely because I’m already fired up about it.

So take this with a grain of salt, if you must, but I think I’m ready to say something ridiculous:  I’m starting to think that Forza Horizon 2 very well might be my favorite driving game of all time.*  The only real thing it’s missing is some sort of crash/stunt mode, which is a feature so closely associated with Burnout that it would be damn near impossible to implement without being charged with plagiarism.

Actually, here’s three more minor knocks that keep it from being a perfect game:  (1) the game looks absolutely gorgeous, but it also suffers from pop-in from time to time and it can be somewhat distracting at times, especially when trees are popping up along the suggested driving line.  (2) I don’t give a shit about car culture, and while I appreciate that the “Horizon Festival” is as good a justification as any for why you’re doing what you’re doing, I don’t really need a narrative justification for driving anywhere, especially if it involves something as contrived as the Horizon Festival – though at least the main guy isn’t that annoying.  (3) But if you are going to go through the trouble of having a narrative justification for doing all this stuff, then why not let me create my own character?  True, you’re behind the wheel of a car for 99% of the game, but I’m there in that other 1%, and while I might be a white guy with brown hair, not everybody who plays this game is also a white guy with brown hair.

Those three knocks aside, I’m loving the hell out of it.  It’s everything I loved about the first game, but better and larger and more beautiful, and I genuinely feel bad that my gaming schedule is about to get crowded, because I’d be happy to keep playing this and only this for the next few months.

More to the point:  it’s a fantastic showcase for the Xbox One, and the more time I spend with the Xbox One, the more I really, really like it.  I took a few minutes during the weekend to load up Ubisoft’s The Crew beta on the PS4, and the PS4’s interface is so bland and dumb.  (Also, The Crew is bland and dumb, and I’m glad I saw the beta if only so that I know to take it off of my GameFly queue.)

 

* I’ve been thinking about what my Top 10 list of driving games might look like, and the list is tricky because while there’s no shortage of driving games out there, there’s only a few franchises that really moved me in any specific way:

  • I’m certainly a big fan of the Forza series in general – and I like it more than I ever liked any of the Gran Turismo games I played – but to be honest, Forza 1-4 all kinda bleed together for me; there’s not one particular title that stands out in my memory.  (As I only just bought my Xbox One last week, I have not yet played Forza 5, though considering the scuttlebutt that surrounded it, I’m not sure I ever will.)
  • Certainly I’d put both Burnout 3 and Burnout Paradise near the very top of the list.
  • I’m a big fan of both DiRT and DiRT 2 – the latter is the better looking of the two, but the former had the best replay system (which was inexplicably changed) and had some of the best UI in any driving game, ever.
  • I loved the first two Rallisport Challenge games on the original Xbox.
  • It’s a bit of a lost gem, but does anybody else remember Midtown Madness 3 on the original Xbox?  That game was awesome.  That was the first real experience I had with online free-roam driving, and to this day I still remember all sorts of silly stuff we used to do – like trying to jump as many trucks as we could fit onto the roofs of various buildings.
  • I was also especially fond of both Project Gotham Racing 2 and 3 (4 was the one where they introduced motorcycles, I think, and that’s also where it fell off the rails for me).
  • Split/Second was terrific and criminally overlooked…
  • I will always have a soft spot for OutRun…
  • My loathing of The Offspring is the main reason why I try not to think about Crazy Taxi, even if the game itself is pretty great.
  • I always enjoyed the Midnight Club games, though I never stuck with them that long.
  • I’m conflicted about the Need for Speed franchise, because (a) the driving is fine, but the cutscenes and the “car culture” is just flat-out ridiculous, and (b) while I really enjoyed Criterion’s two Need for Speed titles, it also meant that we weren’t getting any more Burnout games, which is a supreme bummer.
  • Speaking of “flat-out”, I also have a weird soft spot for that first Flat-Out game, especially on PC, because the physics were completely insane.
  • Could I include Night Driver from the Atari 2600?
  • Or Pole Position?
  • Could I get away with not including any Mario Kart games, because I don’t give a shit about Mario Kart?  or Ridge Racer, for that matter?  or Wipeout, or F-Zero?  or F1 on the PC?

Am I missing any?  Feel free to call me an idiot in the comments.

Weekend Recap: Words, Words, Words

1.  I am around 1700 words into my NaNoWriMo project.  I started with a blank page, put on some ambient drones to keep focused, and let my mind wander a bit until it found the story it wanted to tell.  The story is a bit of a surprise, actually, being that it’s decided it wants to be somewhat non-fictional.  For that reason alone, I’m pretty sure I’m never letting this thing see the light of day unless I change all the names and fudge some of the historical record, but I have to admit that it does feel good to talk about some of this stuff.  I’m not sure I’m going to get 50,000 words out of it – and honestly, most of the words I have written aren’t particularly good – but that’s neither here nor there at this point.  The primary reason that I’m doing this at all is to get in the habit of writing every day, without fear of an audience’s reaction, and I’ll worry about the end result when it’s finished.  To that end, I’m probably not going to write about my progress here, beyond word counts, which is just a way of keeping myself honest.  (And is there anything more insufferable than hearing someone talk about working on their novel?)

2.  I finished the Southern Reach trilogy at around 3am this morning, due to some Daylight Savings-related insomnia, plus a headcold.  I’m not sure that I enjoyed the latter two books as much as I did the first one; one gets the feeling that the first book came all at once, and then the next two were meant to fill in the backstory and to answer some of the first book’s many questions.  Still, they’re all quick, fun reads.  Now I’m re-reading The Stand, which is starting off very strong (and which I apparently remembered in more vivid detail than I’d thought).  Even though I don’t have any Ebola panic, it’s not hard to get sucked into the idea of an apocalyptic plague these days.

3.  I did it, I pulled the trigger; I bought an Xbox One.  And it might even be arriving today!  I was able to get the Sunset Overdrive bundle at the reduced price after all, which was a bit of a relief, and so now I hope my long-lost 360 friends can forgive my prolonged absence.

4.  I don’t know how I feel about Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare getting such positive reviews.  The last CoD game I played was (I think) Black Ops, of which the campaign remains unfinished and the multiplayer remains untouched.  That said, if my XBO friends are playing it, I might give it a quick look after all.

Taking the plunge

1.  So I just received the confirmation email that says I’ve officially signed up for NaNoWriMo, which is something I’ve been thinking about doing for years.  I don’t have any particular idea in mind, and November is also the busiest time of year in terms of AAA videogames, so who knows how this is going to work out, but that’s not even the point – if I can’t carve out an hour of writing time every day, then I have no business calling myself a writer.

I had an idea for a novel a few years ago, and I took a writing class to help develop and flesh it out, but I couldn’t quite figure out what I wanted to do with it, and it ended up withering on the vine.  I’m not sure I want to attempt to resurrect it for NaNo, either; I know myself all too well, and if I got frustrated with reviving it, I’d give up entirely.  I’m also staying away from Scrivener, even though I’m dying to use it; Scrivener seems to be a useful tool when you already have a plot and characters and scenes in mind, and it’s also useful if you already know how to use it without having to hunt and peck.  And I haven’t turned my Macbook on since I updated to Yosemite, so I have no idea if Scrivener is even working at the moment.  In any event, I’m determined to not let technical difficulties get in the way, so I’m keeping it simple and sticking to GoogleDocs on my home/work PCs.

I suppose there’s a part of me that’s annoyed that it takes something like NaNo for me to get off my ass, but there’s another part of me that’s well aware that this is why NaNo exists in the first place, and so I’m going to try not to beat myself up about it too much.

2.  I am now into the third and final book of the Southern Reach Trilogy, which I am enjoying quite a bit; it’s a very quick read, and makes for an entertaining come-down after the lofty heights of The Bone Clocks.  The second book (“Authority”) wasn’t quite as well-written or as absorbing as the first (“Annihilation”), but the third (“Acceptance”) is immediately gripping and seems to be on much firmer ground, which bodes well.

After I finish this one, I’m not quite sure what I’ll read next.  I still have a hefty backlog to get caught up on, for one thing, and I’m also considering giving the uncut version of The Stand a re-read after polling my Facebook friends on their preferred Stephen King novel – specifically asking between The Stand and It.  “It” was always my favorite, whereas “The Stand” never quite hooked me; I’m willing to give it another shot, though.

Hell, I might as well open up the floor here:

3.  I recently received a preview code for The Talos Principle, a first-person puzzle game from Croteam.  I’m about 2 hours into it so far; I’m enjoying it, despite some odd tonal dissonance and puzzle repetitiveness.  I’m not quite sure what I’m allowed to say about it – I don’t often receive preview codes – but I will say that it’s certainly a refreshing change of pace after the suffocating tension of Alien Isolation.

4.  I’m having trouble finding the Sunset Overdrive Xbox One bundle at the discounted price, but Amazon has already started accepting pre-orders at the new price for their Assassin’s Creed Unity bundle (which also includes ACIV at no extra charge).  I’ve already ordered the digital version of ACU for the PS4, but given that Ubisoft’s already made it very clear that they’re aiming for graphical parity between PS4 and XBO, I can’t help but wonder if I should cancel the PS4 pre-order and get this bundle instead.

5.  I’m not much of a drinker these days, but I’ve developed a fondness for spiced rum, which is quite nice for sipping during a cool autumn evening.  I’m not sure why I felt compelled to bring that up, but it’s too late now.

Weekend Recap: foliage

1.  We were away for a wedding this weekend, and so there isn’t much going on in the way of SFTC-relevant posting.  But I must reiterate how wonderful it is to be away from the internet these days.  No hashtags, no doxxing, no bullshit; just a few beautiful autumn days with good friends, free of day job worries and parental responsibilities.

2.  I’ve been down on the Xbox One a lot on this blog, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want one; even though I’m really happy with my PS4, I’m still an Xbox fanboy at heart, and I’ve been hoping for something to push me over the edge (and being able to import all of my Pinball FX2 tables from the 360, while much appreciated, wasn’t quite enough.)  As it happens, Microsoft’s finally delivered the one-two punch I needed:  both Sunset Overdrive and Forza Horizon 2 have been getting good-to-great reviews, and now Microsoft has announced a temporary $50 price cut starting this weekend.  Would it surprise you to learn, then, that all of my dreams last night were about buying an Xbox One?

3.  So last week I said I’d been debating putting Alien Isolation down, and last night I finally made the decision to pull the plug.  I think I’m about halfway through it; I’m currently in the level where I’m trying to access the APOLLO core, and I had to turn in all my weaponry, and all the Working Joes are immune to EMP mines.  The “turn in all your weapons” trope felt a little contrived, frankly, and progressing through the level was becoming more frustrating than anything else, and I don’t particularly care about the game’s fiction to keep butting my head against the wall.  I’ve kept my save file just in case I get the itch to finish it down the road, but I sent the disc back to GameFly and, for the moment, I’m considering myself done with it.

4.  This means that, barring a spontaneous Xbox One purchase this weekend, I’ve got a little bit of time to try and get back into Shadow of Mordor before this year’s final 3 AAA GOTY contenders arrive in November (i.e., Assassin’s Creed Unity (or “AssUnit”), Far Cry 4, and Dragon Age Inquisition).  It’s been so long since I last tried playing it that I might as well start over from scratch – I don’t think I was that far into it, and hopefully I’ll now have an easier time figure out what the hell I’m supposed to do.

5.  I didn’t quite know what to read after getting turned upside down by The Bone Clocks last week; I’d started reading John Le Carre’s A Perfect Spy but that’s not exactly a palate cleanser.  So, instead, I started Annihilation, the first book in the “Southern Reach trilogy” by Jeff VanderMeer.  And that was, in fact, the correct choice.  Each book in the trilogy is incredibly short (at least when compared to everything else I’ve been reading lately); I think it only took me 2 days to finish that first book (and I had a busy weekend).  I’m now 3 chapters into the 2nd book, Authority, and I’m hooked.