![]() If you’ve read their first book, Freshwater, the themes in Dear Senthuran will be familiar to you. Dear Senthuran is a memoir told in a series of intimate letters. I still stand by that assessment but this book didn’t do it for me. I’ve previously described Akwaeke Emezi as one of the English language’s best living writers. The shortlist will be announced some time next week, I’m curious to see if it makes it. Incidentally, Great Circle is on the Booker Longlist. It’s not entirely my thing but I can see a very large audience for it. It’s an old-fashioned feminist story: a woman pursues her passion despite the forces of the patriarchy being against her. I would have enjoyed it a lot more if it wasn’t about aviation (I skipped the detailed descriptions of flying equipment) but that is a matter of personal taste. If anything, watching Hollywood attempt to piece together Marian’s life from fragments and artefacts provides a great meta-commentary on the nature of biography. I’ve seen reviewers suggest that the second storyline was a distraction. The writer Maggie Shipstead not only gives the reader rich and sensitive historical fiction but complements it with a second narrative strand about a present-day Hollywood adaptation of Marian’s story. This is a 600-page epic that spans the circumstances of Marian’s birth all the way to her disappearance during her north-south circumnavigation of the earth. Great Circle is a novel about the fictional aviator Marian Graves. We’re mostly done with 2021 and I’m still waiting for my book of the year. Here are 4 books I’ve read in recent months that I haven’t told you about yet. I’m in a strange bind: I can’t stop thinking about this game but I really want to forget it so I can play it all over again. Go in blind like I did and enjoy Disco Elysium. ![]() I have a lot to say about the plot, which is as rich as any literary fiction I’ve read recently (the ending, so beautiful), but I’m intentionally withholding details because I really want you to play this game. You make more progress the more you build yourself up. ![]() The personality you create for yourself dictates your experience of the game. If I played a more Empathy-forward character, I would have had more luck getting guarded characters to open up to me. I played a character who was heavy on Intellect so I was rewarded with a play run that was full of trivia about Revachol. These skills are the main gameplay mechanism but they also, seamlessly, make up your character’s personality. (There is no action.) You unlock different dialogue trees by allotting points to various skill sets. It’s a conversation simulator and rewards the type of player who doesn’t skip dialogue to get to the action. This game doesn’t have combat or multi-jump levels to clear. You also meet enterprising businessmen, loyal union members, and (my favourite) erudite/pretentious undergraduates who are trying to revive the spirit of Communism.Īre you truly a leftist if you don’t cast aspersions on the ideological purity of other leftists? You meet drug-addled preteens and disillusioned teenage vandals. There’s a building called the “Doomed Commercial Area” where businesses go to die. The statue of the old monarch has been defaced with a bullet. The game paints a beautiful and tragic picture of a defeated city that’s trying to breathe again. ![]() All of this is set in Revachol, a city trying to rebuild itself after a crushed Communist revolution. The player’s job is reconstruction - you have a murder to solve and you have to figure out who you are. In Disco Elysium, you play a cop who’s lost his memory after a legendary and destructive bender. Luckily, Disco Elysium is the best thing I’ve read all year. With over one million words in the game, there’s a lot to read. I described it to a friend as a “game for readers”. It wasn’t intentional I just found the game so immersive that I could think of little else when I was away from it. For two weeks in August, I put all my books away and played Disco Elysium. ![]()
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