Neuromancer & a reading list in lieu of actually wanting to write anything about Neuromancer
we all love lists
As a result of my Tim Rogers Action Button rewatch, I’ve been diving into various libraries suggested by the reviews: the filmography of Yasujiro Ozu as discussed in the Boku No Natsuyasumi review, the wide portfolio of Keanu Reeves movies as discussed in the Cyperpunk review, and - also because of Cyberpunk - am reading* my first William Gibson novel, Neuromancer. *Maybe idk I am struggling with the very act of reading this book.
Friend of the show/one of three people reading right now described her own experience reading Neuromancer reassuringly, with “I have two settings with Gibson. I devour the book in one sitting, or it’s IMPOSSIBLE to read” and then we had a brief convo about how neither of us have ever successfully read Pynchon. I honestly just don’t care about, like, 90% of the action in this book? I fully lost track of everyone’s motivations during the lengthy descriptions of the various stages of the heist. I don’t think it’s “bad”, it’s just deeply not my thing. I have nothing substantive to say about it, perhaps except that going into literally outer space on top of the novel’s then-novel going into cyberspace is kind of overkill and roughly where I stopped following the plot.
So instead of talking about Neuromancer, I’m just making a list in this installment (post? newsletter? neither feels right! what is a substack) of what I actually really want to prioritize getting around the reading or playing. Not literally everything I want to read, or even have a neglected copy of in my apartment. What, at this point, I feel some sense of wanting to prioritize actually reading, organized into a list to refer to next time I’m impulsively about to read something else. A reading list, as it were.
Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy) - dude just died! :(
The Passenger (Cormac McCarthy)
Disco Elysium - I need to finish this game already jfc
A Sacred and Terrible Air (Robert Kurvitz) - There’s a fan translation now of the novel by Disco Elysium’s lead designer and writer set in the same world as Disco Elysium. The writing in that game is beautiful and mysterious, so if the fan translation managed to capture that, wow, this could be one of my favorite things literally ever
Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson) - I just want my cyberpunk investigation over already. Tim Rogers’s Cyberpunk video talked about Neuromancer and Snow Crash briefly and I realized, “oh, Snow Crash seems like my kind of humor/commentary, I’d probably like that one more, but Neuromancer just came in from the library, so…”
Persona 3 Portable - A friend said this was their favorite Persona and I’m down
Persona 2: Innocent Sin - Tim Rogers said was his favorite Persona and I’m down
Persona 4 Golden - Everyone else said this was their favorite Persona and I’m down
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (Agatha Christie) - I’ve heard a few times this is a Good one, and I haven’t read much Agatha Christie!
Kentucky Route Zero - I’m gonna have to start this one over because it’s been so long, but honestly that might be the right approach for a game as meditative as this one
The Black Dahlia (trying to see if I actually like true crime or just liked My Favorite Murder before it got cancelled for selling out to Amazon)
Severance (Ling Ma) - we now enter a section of my reading list I call: books that have been on my “read these next” bookshelf for forever, as opposed to on my other “whoops” bookshelf
Pachinko (Min Jin Lee)
To Write As If Already Dead (Katie Zambreno)
Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (William Craft and Ellen Craft)
My Brilliant Friend (Elena Ferrante)
Disgrace (J M Coetzee)
Say Nothing (Patrick Radden Keefe)
Detransition, Baby (Tory Peters)
Permafrost (Eva Baltasar) - Spontaneous purchase at a bookstore on the staff recommended shelf that talked about how poets writing novels can make for cool weird novels and I was like yeah tell me more
Randy (Mike Sacks) - Same except it might be some postmodern annotated copy of a strange self-published memoir found at a garage sale or I might misremember why I spontaneously bought this
Salute to Spring (Meridel Le Sueur) - I think this was recommended on a book list personality test my girlfriend got me a while back and ya know it looks like a pretty thin book I should just read already
Yakuza 0 - idk if this is a “reading” game or a “playing” game but Tim Rogers has described it as a “half hour before bed, almost a dinnertime game” which suggests it’s more about getting the story than it is about dopamine-pumping feats of skill so it goes on the reading list for “books” for now
The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism (Kyle Chayka) - I added this to my Goodreads after revisiting an old episode of a video game podcast where they talked about the type of art that people want to engage with when the vibes, culturally, are bad, and I caught this time around that a lot of their conversation was informed by this author, and then my girlfriend texted me that she saw that and that she had a copy of it, so I have no excuse to not learn about bad vibes now
Swimming in the Dark (Tomasz Jedrowski) - my sister lent me this a year ago oops
The World Gives Way (Marissa Levien) - my girlfriend lent me this two years ago oops
Little Fish (Casey Plett)
Maybe I also need a longlist for the video games that might be words-focused but might not be and this not reading list material and I need to remember I’d like to get to because this is getting unwieldy:
Citizen Sleeper
In Other Waters
Night in the Woods
Final Fantasy IV, V, VI, VIII, X, X-2, XII
Actually this is embarrassing enough let’s put a pin in this for now and check in on my Progress* later (*this is of course a byproduct of capitalism and therefore to some extent fake)
I’ve joined the team at Kissing Dynamite as a Book Reviews Editor! I’ll be writing reviews of small press/self-published poetry books (the first one is now live), but I’ll also be editing other writers’ reviews of small press poetry books. So: hit me up if 1) you’re a poet with a book coming out, or 2) you’ve got a review of a poetry book you want to write!