Lonesome Dove (1985) by Larry McMurtry

I was at a college house party once, more than a decade ago. I had just gotten an insignificant job writing about video games for an online publication. It didn't pay much, but I was a broke college student who enjoyed writing and I had been playing video games since before I could read, so it was a good match. I had been discussing this with one of my good friends when an acquaintance butted in. 

He was a friend-of-a-friend type; the kind of person who sits on the periphery of these conversations and, rather than seeming awkward, radiates a haughty, above-it-all air with a shit-eating grin that makes you want to toss a blunt object into their teeth like they're bowling pins.

Let's call him Jake.

Jake was not a tall fellow, but what he lacked in length he made up for in thickness. He had bleached blond spiky hair, embarrassingly poor tattoos, and the kind of beach muscles that would make a Jersey Shore cast member blush. I didn't know him well, but he seemed an affable enough sort when we did make small talk. I don't even remember how we came to know him—probably a friend of one of my girlfriend's friend's boyfriend's.

Jake made his entrance into my periphery and loomed under me. "You're still playing video games!? You gotta stop playing video games, man." He chuckled, subtly imparting to me how ridiculous my hobby was, and how silly it made me look. His comment was timed to perfectly coincide with the end of the conversation that was happening just prior—my friend to whom I was just speaking had already ambled on and was now out of earshot of Jake's comments.

This was nearly 15 years ago, but I can still remember Jake's sneering face in my mind's eye.

I was completely taken aback. Video games and those who play them have never enjoyed a sterling reputation, of course—and that reputation has decreased exponentially during the years since this conversation happened. But Jake's words were an openly made, mocking criticism the likes of which I hadn't heard since I'd been called a nerd in grade school.

At first I didn't respond, just gaped at him like an idiot, which likely confirmed his judgment of me.

"Well, they are paying me," I eventually managed, and left Jake to wallow in his smugness.

I assume that justification meant little to him—someone who wouldn't be caught dead doing such a detestable thing as playing a video game, paid or not—and, to be honest, the justification itself meant almost nothing to me. I'd have gone on playing video games whether I was being paid to or not, simply because I loved them. A few days later, after the embarrassment passed, I thought again about the incident, recoiled, and became internally angry about it. Who is he to judge my hobbies!? That anger eventually dampened, too, and gave way to introspection. Jake's statement left a lingering question in my mind: Why do I play video games? What is it that I enjoy so much about them? Why can I sit down at my computer desk and be so wholly locked into this experience that it would take a monumental sense of responsibility and discipline to move myself away from it? Why, when I think back on certain periods of my life, do I immediately think about which video games I was playing around that time?

And, further: Is this all of this adoration artificial? Maybe they are just a complete waste of time, and I've been tricked into thinking otherwise. Perhaps video games satiate my mind the way cotton candy might fill your stomach when you're hungry—completely lacking in any actual substance, and better replaced by something more substantial. Maybe everyone sees this except me, and I'm being a fool about it.

I am nothing if not a hobbyist, and over the past 15 years I've asked myself these kinds of questions about my hobbies many times:

"Is this worthwhile?" 

"What value does this offer me?"

"Is this enriching my life?"

The process has become what I consider to be a healthy habit with regards to how I spend my free time. In recent years I've begun to develop an answer to that question when I've asked it of my lifelong infatuation with video games.

Video games can be deceptive to those who play them, and even moreso to those who don't. On the surface, it's easy to see why they're so attractive: They look beautiful (especially nowadays), they provide a steady dopamine drip by feeding the player bite-sized rewards for accomplishing menial tasks, and they immerse their players with heaping doses of escapism, allowing them to forget their troubles—sometimes to great fault, as gaming addiction is a very real thing which destroys lives by allowing the player to so effectively ignore their problems while their entire life crumbles around them.

But for me, games go beyond those minor benefits, and their value easily eclipses their pitfalls. My favorite moments in games often come when I feel a completely foreign sense of place; when I'm existing, as another person, in a place so foreign to me that I'd never have thought it up on my own. My senses are assaulted by this notion of otherworldliness and my brain regularly struggles to accept such a novel experience.

I'm on a planet far out into the depths of the Milky Way, staring at twin suns as the wind howls around me.

I'm on horseback in a quiet orchard in a fantasy world, trotting slowly along past a giant windmill.

It's 2029 in Prague, and I'm taking a moment of respite in my apartment as an unsettled city howls curses around me.

So when I think of what actual value it is that video games impart on my life, I'm left ignoring the moment-to-moment satisfaction of leveling up or getting a new piece of gear, and instead focusing on this intense feeling of having been at such a unique place at a certain point in my life. The experience of existing in this reality alone, of adapting to its rules and thinking critically about its events, is a worthwhile endeavor even in a vacuum, but it's profoundly affecting within the context of the current challenges one is faced with in their life; playing a game about human social relationships after a difficult break-up, or a game which examines a struggle you know about personally such as substance abuse. Even something as simple as an open world game which takes place in a city to which you've been.

These places may not exist in reality, and few of them are experiences which you could have in the real world. But these fantastical experiences have bled into my psyche and the challenges they've proposed to my thought processes exist now not only as a memory, but as a part of who I am; a part of the way I think about and affect the real world around me. I've lived other lives, I've spoken with people who do not actually exist. I've considered their problems and how I might impact them. I've enriched my own life experience and thought processes with each new "place" I visit, and I truly believe I've become a more empathetic, considerate person because I have played so many video games.

The Dunwich Horror (1929) by H.P. Lovecraft

Lovecraft is undoubtedly a master of atmospheric writing. His strength is in setting scenes and crafting an appropriate mood with which to manage the experience he's looking for from his readers. The opening paragraph of The Dunwich Horror is a fine example of this skill:

When a traveler in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean's Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country. The ground gets higher, and the brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road. The trees of the frequent forest belts seem too large, and the wild weeds, brambles, and grasses attain a luxuriance not often found in settled regions. At the same time the planted fields appear singularly few and barren; while the sparsely scattered houses wear a surprizing uniform aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation. Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled, solitary figures spied now and then on crumbling doorsteps or in the sloping, rock-strewn meadows. Those figures are so silent and furtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbidden things, with which it would be better to have nothing to do. When a rise in the road brings the mountains in view above the deep woods, the feeling of strange uneasiness is increased. The summits are too rounded and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and sometimes the sky silhouettes with especial clearness the queer circles of tall stone pillars with which most of them are crowned.

Beyond that, though, I have to make the striking confession that I think I hate H.P. Lovecraft's work.

Reading Lovecraft's stories are, to me, the horror equivalent of reading a trashy romance paperback on a crowded train. You've got to have significant self-confidence to take undampened pleasure in reading this sort of thing in public. Lovecraft's naming conventions and otherworldly jargon always read undeniably cheesy to me. The actions which take place in the story and his characters' absurdly overdone gravitas in reaction to them always strike me as so unnatural and overly saturated that I find them impossible to take seriously:

"Ygnaiih ... ygnaiih ... thflthkh'ngha ... Yog-Sothoth...." rang the hideous croaking out of space. "Y'bthnk ... h'ehye ... n'grkdl'lh...." 

"Eh-ya-ya-ya-yahaah ... e'yaya-yayaaaa ... ngh'aaaa ... ngh'aaaa ... h'yuh ... h'yuh ... HELP! HELP! ... ff—ff—ff—FATHER! FATHER! YOG-SOTHOTH!..."

Perhaps that's part of the charm. I have never been a fan of camp. It often falls deafly on me and I gather no amusement from it whatsoever. I feel a lot of the same vibe shared between Lovecraft's stories and cheesy '80s horror films. So maybe that's what I'm missing here. Either way, the content of these stories and the way in which they are told is not something that appeals to me, and given that I am now several stories into Lovecraft's oeuvre, I expect they will never appeal to me the way they appeal to Lovecraft's fans.

Undoubtedly inspired by far better writers such as Poe, Lovecraft falls into some of the same complaints I have with Poe's work (although I love him, generally); he relies on some of the same woefully overdone dialogue in fruitless attempts to reconstruct the vernacular of the time period which he depicts:

"An' then she let aout a turrible yell, an' says the shed daown the rud hed jest caved in like the storm hed blowed it over, only the wind wa'n't strong enough to dew that. Everybody was a-listenin', an' ye could hear lots o' folks on the wire a-gaspin'. All to onct Sally she yelled agin, an' says the front yard picket fence bed jest crumpled up, though they wa'n't no sign o' what done it. Then everybody on the line could hear Cha'ncey an' ol' Seth Bishop a-yellin', tew, an' Sally was shriekin' aout that suthin' heavy hed struck the haouse—not lightnin' nor nothin', but suthin' heavy agin' the front, that kep' a-launchin' itself agin an' agin, though ye couldn't see nuthin' aout the front winders. An' then ... an' then...."

I won't mince words here: This is utter garbage. I cannot stand it, and I refuse to read it. Perhaps I'm missing out on key story turns by skipping this stinking trash, but I'd rather stop reading the story than plod through this kind of thing. I level the same complaints towards Poe when he resorts to this crap, and Lovecraft has no excuse because folksy vernacular has already been depicted in a far better manner by writers prior to him from which he ought to have taken inspiration.

I find it more than passing amusing that some works created in the modern day which are undoubtedly inspired by Lovecraft appeal to me far more than the work of the man himself. I think this is a credit to his imagination and the atmospheric quality of his writing, but also affected by his lack of ability as an actual storyteller and his lack of properly managing the tone of his stories. They've never struck me as particularly terrifying, either; this could be due to the fact that he so often leans heavily on fear of the other; that which is foreign to us. This was surely more revolting and disconcerting to one such as Lovecraft, who is often criticized in modern circles for being a racist and a xenophobe. Such an enlightened, open-minded thinker as myself is utterly unaffected by such archaic thinking. Kidding aside; this brand of horror doesn't work for me, although the otherworldliness of his cosmic horror is something I do find enticing. I suspect his aesthetic is strongly responsible for why I gravitate towards Lovecraftian horror, but not Lovecraft's horror.

The more of Lovecraft I read, the less I like him. Which is ironic considering that Lovecraft relies so much on the horror of the unknown, the unknowable, and the other... And his mythology is so much more strange and enticing when you know very little about it.

⭐

Animal Farm (1944) by George Orwell

Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on—that is, badly.

As a traditional liberal I'm not above admitting that my enjoyment of this book is carried by a healthy amount of confirmation bias. That admittance aside, I found Orwell's blatantly allegorical and satirical effort impossible to put down.

Animal Farm doesn't overstay its welcome, which is good; its 'gimmick' would have worn itself out before too long had the pagecount been heftier. More than anything, it's thoroughly amusing. The setting and characters are immediately silly and thus disarming, allowing for the later events of the story to be that much more affecting. This is not a book which has any pretension towards profundity; it's not all that deep and doesn't spend much time ruminating on the ideas its lambasting. Rather, it reads angrily; with a thoroughly frustrated air to me. Orwell's distaste for the Soviet Union at a time when his government had been somewhat unperturbed by Stalin's actions is palpable, and reading between Animal Farm's lines in this fashion was an added layer of entertainment for me. Orwell succeeds in transferring his bitter opposition to the grinding, cancerous, malformed wheel of Stalinism and puts together an affecting, cautionary tale on revolution—despite its glossy layer of silly satire. I had myself fully prepared for Orwell's satire and was thus caught off-guard by just how affecting the impact of the story's climax was.

Orwell's ever a master satirist, but, even more deeply, he also regularly succeeds at making the emotional impact of his storytelling resonate with his readers. Animal Farm's tight, pacey narrative and initially disarming silliness which gives way to emotional, affecting storytelling make it worth a read.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐