Books - What are you reading?

Id be interested in what you think of invisible cities. I had to read it at uni, and found it a chore, however I have had it recommended to me several times for a re-read. Its sitting in my to read pile but keeps getting shunted down.

Started reading it this morning, currently halfway through. And holy shit, I think this has potential to be one of my favourite books. I'm really enjoying it, I think it's beautiful. I think if I had to actually study it and then write about what I'd studied, I imagine I'd be having less fun, but as a river of words washing over me it's just fantastic.

I play a text-based browser game called Fallen London, in which you navigate sequences of brief "storylets" that jumble together in a fragmentary, dreamlike sort of way to construct a narrative of sorts. The writers often riff off literature and poetry, e.g. there's a storyline where your character has various dreams, and all of the dreams are centred around the titles of the sections in T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland - so you'll have a dream about the Fire Sermon, and another one about What the Thunder Said and so forth. Anyway, I can really see the influence of Calvino and Invisible Cities in Fallen London.

I can see it even more in the spin-off game Sunless Sea where you go about on a little boat visiting different cities and learning their stories. The title of the game comes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan ("Where Alph, the sacred river, ran / Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea"), which seems to be another little nod to Calvino.

Anyway yeah, so am more than happy to recommend Invisible Cities. And also to recommend both of those games to anyone who likes both literature and casual gaming 💁