Finally read Piranesi
I have not done a lot of novel reading in the last decade. I can think of a variety of reasons why this may have happened. Having a cell phone is I think the biggest one, since it fills up my time with a lot of chopped-up, calorie-free writing.
The other major reason I quit reading novels is that I started reading a lot more screenplays and comic books. I found this extremely useful as a working games writer. The actual text you write when you are writing for a videogame is structurally and stylistically very similar to the actual text in film and comic book scripts. Comic books in particular, I think, teach you how to write good game dialogue. You really gotta learn how to share attention with visual art, and comic books are absolutely the best example of that kind of thing. And there are so many complex and even "literary" comic books to read! I've written about several of them on this blog in the last few months.
Turning away from novels so that you can slurp down tons of fancy graphic novels does make it difficult to answer certain types of job interview questions, though. There's a certain type of games interviewer who really wants you to be reading novels! I've definitely made some people, both narrative hiring managers and people in other disciplines, majorly uncomfortable when I told them I had a giant pile of screenplay PDFs at home, and a comic book coming to me in the mail, and maybe a short story or two that I could remember... but I hadn't read a novel in over a year. I think they want me to demonstrate some kind of soulful, passionate interest in writing, which they epitomize in the craft of novel-writing specifically. So when you say, "Oh, I read A Garden of Spheres recently," not only do they have no idea what that is, they just don't respect it!
This isn't the main reason I decided to start reading more novels again, but it's certainly a reason. The other reason is that I've got a list of popular stuff from the last several years and I wanted to chew through it. I started with Piranesi.
It's extremely good!! I probably should have read it earlier. I quite liked its mix of old-school survival adventure-writing and almost narrative-deduction-game-ass document-sleuthing. It draws inspiration very self-consciously [laudatory] from a variety of literary and philosophical inspirations and it was quite a lot of fun to see the 19th century shipwrecked-sailor stuff in its most surreal form here.
It's maybe too cautious about overstaying its welcome. I found that the mystery resolved very quickly, because the protagonist spends quite a lot of the story trying hard to not solve it. Instead, you watch him do a lot of anxious self-soothing and rationalization and denial. The last third of the story gets a bit crowded with this stuff, and it has to very suddenly come together. I was at peace with it, though - watching the protagonist rationalize what's happening to him is one of the core pleasures of the story, so it's not a bad trade-off.
One of the reasons I'm reading novels again is that I bought a very cheap e-ink reader and, lo and behold, I really do read a lot faster with it. I should have gotten one a long time ago!! I'll write about it in a bit, but I have to read a bit more with it before I'm sure about what I want to say.
Anyway: Piranesi by Susanna Clarke is very good! Everyone's already known this for years, and I just figured it out!