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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! Of course, regular readers will know that ‘book’ was actually the name of the doctor, but that’s beside the point. This week, it’sSyphilisationandThe Quiet Sleepdeveloper andRPS contributor, Nikhil Murthy! Cheers Nikhil! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
I read Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg for work because I was curious about howahimsawould look when filtered through pop self-help. It was an unsurprisingly shallow read with no understanding of structural problems or nonviolence. I wouldn’t recommend it at all.
Before that I read Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice by Jordan Magnuson, a book which I quite enjoyed even if I have a fundamentally different idea of what constitutes a game poem. Poetry in video games is still a big question in the field and books like this help triangulate towards an answer. I also read Journey to Portugal, a very idiosyncratic and often funny travelogue by Jose Sarramago that finally solved the mystery for me of how Pena Palace can be both so tacky and so sublime.
I read Postcolonial Love Poems before that and I highly recommend it. It’s thunderous, bloody and intelligent. It’s been a bit over a month since I read it and I’m still digesting what I read. I’m almost greedy to go over it again.
Honestly, I would say Frederica by Georgette Heyer. It’s such a luxury to have a book that you can curl up with and read for pleasure after a long day. This used to be Wodehouse, Christie and Pratchett for me but I’ve read and reread them so many times and Heyer is every bit as good but has lots of books that I have yet to read.
For something deeper, I often recommend Eric Hobsbawn as a way to understand the links between colonialism, the industrial revolution and much of the basis of modern inequality. I also tell people to check out The Last Heroes by P. Sainath. There are not that many people left who actually fought for India’s freedom and P. Sainath wrote this book as a record of their stories before the movement passes from living memory. I also keep pushing The Conquest Of Bread by Peter Kropotkin on tech bros.
Great answers, although bad news for those of you that end up adding all our guest’s weekly recommendations to your piles. Also bad news because, yet again, our guest really dropped the ball when it came to the implied assignment to name every book in existence. I guess we’ll have to do it all over again next week, then! No attempted sign off this time. Go make the good art you’ve always wanted to and don’t let anyone own it but you.
