I’ve recently been seeing more fiction writers like myself turning to video games for inspiration. The ways that books and video games can tell us stories aren’t as different as I used to think. Both require intense concentration and thoughtful interaction, albeit in different ways. Both also insist upon our willingness to escape from the workaday world in order to step into one built word by word or bit by bit by somebody else.
Now, with summer fully upon us, it’s time to—however reluctantly—step away from our video games and head to the beach or the local pool. For those gamers willing to put down the controller for a few hours and pick up a book, I’ve compiled a list of five novels that gamers are likely to enjoy.
Jason Rekulak’s enjoyable debut novel The Impossible Fortress actually includes a video game. I know that sounds implausible, but each chapter begins with a line of BASIC code. It looks like this:
200 REM *** ESTABLISHING DIFFICULTY ***
210 PRINT “{CLR}{15 CSR DWN}”
220 PRINT “SELECT SKILL LEVEL”
And so on. If you have an old Commodore 64 in the attic, you could type it all in and play a simple game. A more contemporary version of the same game can be found on Rekulak’s website.
His story, set in 1987, features 14-year-old Will Marvin, whose commitment to coding a C=64 game of his own is causing him to flunk the ninth grade. He collaborates with his friend Mary to enter a game design contest, but his other friends’ increasingly desperate attempts to score a copy of Playboy becomes distracting. Those of us who grew up in the 1980s will appreciate the nostalgic recollections of cassette tapes and floppy diskettes.
A video game also sits at the heart of another recent debut novel, Nathan Hill’s The Nix. In, it, World of Elfscape—an obvious stunt double for the massively popular World of Warcraft—features prominently. Having spent more time than is probably reasonable playing WoW, one passage in particular about the game’s weekly maintenance downtime hit close to home for me. A character by the name of Pwnage is waiting for the game servers to restart:
And not knowing exactly when the servers would come back online made Pwnage feel stressed out, which was a bit of a paradox because the ostensible reason he played Elfscape was because it so effectively relieved his stress. It was where he turned when he felt too encumbered by the wearying details of his life.
Nix’s writing rings true to my own gaming experiences and to a discussion I had with a clinical psychologist about the nature of video-game addiction while I was researching a nonfiction book. So too does Lucky Wander Boy by D.B. Weiss, which also features a fictional gamer’s determined efforts to keep playing no matter what. Before working on the Games of Thrones television series, Weiss wrote a book that reads like both a love letter to early arcade-cabinet video games and a purposely pompous dissertation on their supposed meanings.
Our bro hero, Adam Pennyman, is planning the ultimate guide to video games, the Catalogue of Obsolete Entertainments. “It is difficult to ignore the similarities between Donkey Kong (the creature) and the demiurge of the Gnostic heresies,” Pennyman writes. “After imprisoning the true creator and occupying her harmonious creation, Donkey Kong defiles it, knocks it out of whack, making it as imperfect as the material world we are compelled to live in.”
Pennyman wants to find and play a fictional and scarce arcade game from his childhood, Lucky Wander Boy. His quest sends him on every variety of misadventures and provides Weiss the opportunity to wax philosophic. It’s a riot, but Pennyman does make a compelling case for the importance of video games: “The Classic games were Classic because, like classical music or architecture, they strove to give life and weight to ideals of order and proportion, to provide a vision of timelessness.”
One of the storylines in the magisterial Plowing the Dark by my former MFA professor Richard Powers involves a startup company’s efforts to create an immersive virtual reality environment known as the Cavern. The developers, it turns out, take inspiration not only from Plato’s famous allegory of the cave in The Republic, but also the classic text-based game Colossal Cave Adventure. One of the characters experiences a twinge of nostalgia that will sound very familiar to many of us who still play those old text-based games:
He stared at the sentences and saw his father, one Saturday morning in 1977 when young Jackie had been acting out, taking him to the office and parking him in front of a gleaming Televideo 910, hooked up to a remote mainframe through the magic of a Tymeshare 300-baud modem.
Many longtime gamers know that Colossal Cave Adventure directly inspired what is arguably the most influential video game of all time, Adventure for the Atari 2600. That was the first graphic adventure game and it included the first known Easter egg in video game history. At the time, video game designers didn’t receive much in the way of public credit for their work.
In Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, the fictional game designer James Halliday described what happened next: “‘So the guy who created Adventure, a man named Warren Robinett, decided to hide his name inside the game itself. He hid a key in one of the game’s labyrinths. If you found this key, a small pixel-sized gray dot, you could use it to enter a secret room where Robinett had hidden his name.”
This is a true story. I spoke to Robinett while writing my own book. “I called it my signature,” he told me. “Like down in the corner of the painting.”
Robinett’s sneaky Easter egg was central to Cline’s epic of geek literature. In Ready Player One, Halliday created a massively multiplayer online game called OASIS that grew so large it became a kind of virtual reality. Inspired by Adventure, upon his death, he made it known that he hid an Easter egg in OASIS. Cline’s story details the exploits of the teenage Wade Watts, who dreams of discovering Halliday’s secret and inheriting his vast fortune. True to form, Cline buried an Easter egg of his own deep in Ready Player One and in 2012 he gave a DeLorean to the first person who found it.
(Perhaps this would be a good time to admit that my own novel included an Easter egg—a hidden reference to a particular, well-known video game—that to the best of my knowledge no one has yet discovered. Good luck finding it. Sorry, though: I will not be buying anyone a sports car.)
Video games have played important roles in many other novels, of course, like God Jr. by Dennis Cooper, United States of Japan by Peter Tieryas, and JPod by Douglas Coupland. One detail that jumps out about this reading list, though, is that these are all written by men. That might be consistent with the unfortunate public stereotype about gamers, but in reality, according to the Pew Research Center, “equal numbers of men and women play video games” and “there are no differences by race or ethnicity in who plays video games.”
I’ve discovered many short stories about video games by women, including Kit Reed, Kelly Link, and Amber Sparks, but strangely few novels. I know that my friend Natalie Mesnard is writing a novel about video games, and I have every reason to suspect it will be awesome. Holly Jennings’s Arena looks promising, and there are some licensed tie-in books, but please use the comments section to tell me what else I’m missing out on. Perhaps the apparent paucity of novels about video games by writers of color and women has something to do with the fact that their many contributions to video game history have been overlooked for too long. In the years to come, I’m eager to see that change, and for this list to grow and diversify.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
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Barthelme = "Bartle-may" not "Bar-THELM" as I had originally heard. Michael Silverblatt solved that one for me.
Chabon = "SHAY-bun" not "Sha-BON" like my friend has said.
Ummm…oh..
Pynchon = "PIN-chawn" not "PIN-shin" or "PIN-chin" etc. etc.
…and for kicks here are two German oldies that need some respect…
Rilke = "RILL-kuh" not "RILL-kee"
and
Goethe = "GOO-tuh" not "GARE-tuh" like we smarmy Americans like to think it is. I have heard it as "GO-thee" and all kinds of botched up ways, but yesterday I asked a German woman who is a Lit. major and she straightened it out. Apparently, here in the states we overemphasize the umlaut to an R when it isn't as harsh as that. So I am told. Anyway. Those are a few. If I think of more I will post them.
Kyle Winkler.
Ngugi Wa'Thiong'O, Kenyan author whose latest book "Wizard of the Crow" just came out this month.
Seamus Heaney, nobel laureate.
Eoin Colfer, children's author.
The "G" in W.G. Sebald stands for Georg (no e). I think that's pronounced something like Gayorg (hard Es). What thinks ye, Mr. Max?
Also, don't think you ignore the r sound altogether in Goethe
I agree on Ngugi Wa'Thiong'o – I am afraid to even say his name out loud.
Seamus Heaney is pronounced SHAY-mus HEE-knee.
Eoin = "Owen"
And I have always heard Heaney pronounced
"HAY-nee" even by many Irish people, when I visited.
I can't help with the African name, although I will try to find someone who can.
And that's interesting about that Chicago street name…
Kyle
This was a fun excuse to Google curious sources such as the BBC Pronunciation Unit blog. More Chicago lore: Buildings in the Carl Sandburg Village condo complex are named for James, Faulkner, Alcott, Cummings and other authors. Tell the cabbie, "Clark and GO-thee."
Bud: I think I'll just stick with "WG" so as not to worry about such things.
Steve: I always wondered about that Carl Sandburg Village but never knew that the buildings are named after literary greats… Perhaps I can do a little research and put together a post on the place.
I guess I should pitch in a bit as well.
Isn't Rainer Maria Rilke's first name pronounced oddly as well: RYE-ner, not RAY-ner?
Are we sure it isn't BARTH-el-may?
LanguageHat pointed out to me in an email that this probably isn't a definitive list unless I get some more solid sources for some of these. He referred me to Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature, which I'm going to take a look at at the library this weekend.
What about Jorge Luis Borges? HOR-hay LOO-ees BOR-hay, unless I'm mistaken
But remember this?
http://www.villagevoice.com/books/0335,wordsalad,46573,10.html
"
Goethe = "GOO-tuh" not "GARE-tuh" like we smarmy Americans like to think it is. I have heard it as "GO-thee" and all kinds of botched up ways, but yesterday I asked a German woman who is a Lit. major and she straightened it out. Apparently, here in the states we overemphasize the umlaut to an R when it isn't as harsh as that. So I am told. Anyway. Those are a few. If I think of more I will post them."
This isn't really correct. You don't pronounce it GOO, like sticky stuff, tuh.
It is a more gutteral sound, but if you need to simplify the pronunciation "GUH-tuh" would be closer than "GOO-tuh"
Vladimir Nabokov: Vla-DEEM-eer Nuh-BOCK-off. Not NAB-uh-kov, like in The Police's "Don't Stand So Close To Me."
Also, P.G. Wodehouse is WOOD-house. It doesn't rhyme with Patrick Swayze's greatest accomplishment, Roadhouse.
To throw a couple more into the mix:
Jack Kerouac
Michael Houellebecq
how do you say Cervantes? and whats the correct way to say Don Quixote?
is it Don 'KEE-OH-TEE' or 'QUICKS-OTT'
theres a word in English, Quixotic, which is pronounced 'QUICKS-OTIC'
Chabon's website says it's "Shay as in stadium and Bon as in Bon Jovi" — rams
I saw Ngugi wa Thiong'o last week at the Edinburgh Book Festival – I'm not much good at phonetic spelling but his name seems to be pronounced un-goo-gee wah thee-ong-go (hard 'g'in Ngugi, and actually a cross between 'in' and 'un' for the first syllable).
He was a great speaker – terribly articulate in English but a terribly thick accent; I'm quite sure, unfortunately, that I missed some parts of his talk.
don quixote is pronounced: don kee-HO-tay
maud, i've heard ngugi's pronounced similarly: en-goo-gee wa-thyon-go
I've put up a new post that includes some definite pronunciations for a lot of these. Check it out.
Wow, this is the most useful blog post I've ever read!
Houellebecq = WEL BEK
OO ELL BEK, but it'll sound like "WEL BEK" to most English speakers because the "OO ELL" is pronounced so quickly.
(The H is silent, and "ou" in French is like English "oo".)
Michael Critchon–I was told is pronounced CRY ton.
Great info! Thanks!
Lynne AKA The Wicked Witch of Publishing
I'm a librarian… the most mispronounced author name I hear is Annie Proulx.
Proulx, according to my French friends is a very very very old spelling. The "l" and the "x" are both silent. You pronounce it PROO (rhymes with "new".
Don Quixote in SPANISH is pronounced Don Kee-HOH'-teh. The "Don" rhymes with "Tone." I think the other pronunciations derived from French people mis-pronouncing the name. Americans needn't be too ashamed of how we mispronounce foreign words. Have you heard the BBC reporters say "Nicaragua"? Ha! It's a hoot. They say "Nick-uh-RAG-yoo-ah." It is properly pronounced more like "Nee-ka-ra'-wa."
how do you pronounce raymond queneau?
Don Quixote: above poster (hephaestion) is correct. And yes, quixotic is derived from his name, pronounced quiks-OD-ik, as Spanish already has its own "quijotesco" (kee-ho-TES-ko).
Cervantes: ser-VAN-tes. ser has soft "r", almost like "sed", van not like the vehicle, like "yawn", and tes as in "test", omitting the last "t".
Theodore Roethke: RET-key (not ROTH-key)
Queneau: KWEH-NO
The guy got Nabokov's first name right, but in interviews he has said the "bok" rhymes with "smoke" and the "ov" rhymes with "of." He also said once the "bok" rhymes with "gawk," which I think is only correct if you're thinking of a British pronunciation of the word (which I think would then rhyme with "smoke" only with more of a curl in it, making the pronunciation more Russian-sounding, if that makes sense).
I would transcribe it something like–Nuh-bowk-of.
concerning matthew kneale, author of ENGLISH PASSENGERS. Is the correct pronunciation neil oder neilè, which I seem to remember to have picked up somewhere. Thanks
What about Camus?
KAY-muss or ka-MOO ?
DON QUIXOTE…. In the period in which the story was written the 'X' would have been pronounced like 'SH'. So, actually, you would say "kee-sho-tee". Modern Spanish is where "kee-ho-tee" comes from and "kwiks-ott" is pretty laughable (although it has been used for ages).
David Baldacci –
Is it Ball DAH chee or Ball DAK ee ?
Annie Proulx…
Anyone?
How do you pronounce Crais (as in Robert). Is it "Cray" or "Crays"?
Actually, the suggestions are almost right, except that the "ng" in Thiong'o should be a soft "ng" like in "sing". "Ngugi" should be pronounced with just an "n" sound, not an "un", before the "goo gee". If you can't manage that, then start with the "ng" in "sing" and go from there to the hard g sound. Also, my understanding is that in Gikuyu his name would have short vowels where there are ~ marks, such that u would rhyme with "good", etc., but the long-vowel pronounciation is so common in the States I'm sure he's used to it.
How about lieutenant.. some people say lefftenent… any idea why?
Marina
http://www.hotforwords.com
In Rancho Cordova, California there is a Goethe Park. They pronounce it GAY-tee. Weird.
I have lived in Old Town in Chicago for 13 years and everyone I know pronounces Goethe as Guer-tuh, which may be the smarmy American way, however I have never heard it botched to the point of Go-EE-the.
I am new, I stumbled upon this site by chance when I was researching the proper pronunciation of various literary names. I am not sure if it has already been noted or not, but I also found a site called http://www.howjsay.com. It is a website that has a collection of over 2,000 English words (including authors, and commonly used phrases). All you do is type in the author name(i.e.; Albert Camus) and the pronunciation is given. (I read that the pronunciation is researched from a collection of various dictionaries, and other sources). I hope this helps.. or at least you find the site interesting. :) thanks.
John Proulx, Jazz Singer & Pianist is always mispronounced. It is pronounced "Proo" Like "Shoe". Some people have called him John Prowl like the "Owl" This is incorrect. Thank you
Leftenant is the British usage for lieutenant.
Bless you!! I love this site. Annie Proulx is one of my favorite authors, but I'm always afraid to say her name out loud. (I have been saying it correctly- thanks to my junior high school French.)
How do you pronounce Crais? as in Robert Crais?
I have been trying to find out how to pronounce robert L Cvornyek’s name and also Elliot Cuff and also Prince Vuyani Ntintili. If any one can help me out thak you. I dont have an e mail of my own but i would appreciate it if some one would call me back at 1-240-603-9284 with the pronounciation of these words please and th ank you.
Anthony Powell is “Poe-uhl”!
According to my African Literature professor, whose “The River Between” we just read and knows him personally and speaks Kikuyu/Gikuyu, Ngugi wa Thiang’o is pronounced, “NYOO-gee (hard g) wah TEE-ongo”.
It’s not “GOO-tuh”, and I’m not saying your German lit professor was wrong, I’m saying you misheard some subtleties or you did not correctly phonetically spell it out. Pronouncing the German “oe” or umlaut is very hard for some Americans. There is still an ‘R’ there it just gets kind of swallowed by the preceding noise, we just don’t recognize it, and trying to explain how it’s not GOO is kind of difficult, check out Wikipedia’s entry for Goethe and click the “listen” function to the right of his name.
A repeat request – Robert Crais. Is it like CRAY? CRY? CRACE as in grace?
Answering my own question:
According to a 1997 interview with Robert Crais in the Baltimore Sun, his name is pronounced like “face.”
How do I pronounce Louis de Bernières? I get Louis = Loo-ey, but the surname?
I need it for a wedding I’m doing on Saturday – the couple has chosen a reading from Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
Thanks
Anita
my name is Mahala and it is hard to pronounce my name to people.:D
I’d love to kow the correct pronunciation of Don DeLillo’s last name. Is it actually “duh-LIL-lo” as I’ve heard?
Any one knows how to pronounce – Rabineau? I have a meeting tomorrow, can turn embarrassing :o(
Goethe: ‘GOO-tuh’ is completely wrong. Anonymous 25 August 2006 is right. The Germans pronounce him ‘GER-tuh’.
Rabineau = RA-bin-oh (French).
If you live on the Westbank in New Orleans and happen to live on Socrates Street, the pronunciation there is So-Crats. See the wonderful book, “Frenchmen, Desire, Good Children”- these are all street names.
Thanks for this valuable list. To tweak one of the additions: Chabon is actually “SHAY-bon” not “SHAY-bun” (he’s helpfully described it as Shay as in Shea Stadium, Bon as in Bon Jovi).
Here’s how I say Ngugi’s:
IN-goo-gee WAH-tee-ahn-goh
Yeah, I can confirm that in Chicago I’ve never once heard Goethe pronounced anything than “Gerta.”
To the people arguing that “No, it’s GER-tuh” “No, it’s GOO-tuh” – I’m pretty sure it’s neither. The umlaut is a sound that most americans don’t know how to pronounce, so it more like something in between the two. So American though of us to only be able to think of it in American terms.
It is frustrating when authors like Paul Theroux mispronounce their own last name… Thor-EW?
Maybe he should visit French Canada (Quebec) and see how the 99% of the Theroux’s there (some of whom are probably related to him) PROPERLY pronounce it.
I swear that some authors just like to be difficult.
The pronunciation for the last name Barthelme is exactly how it is spelled .
Barth-el -me. Nothing fancy as you can see it is my last name and people try to make it sound more glorious than it is .
Merriam Webster lists the pronunciation of Mr. Pynchon’s name as “\ˈpin-chən\.” I’m inclined to trust Merriam rather than themillions.com, barring any further evidence.
I once had an embarrassing experience pronouncing ‘Goethe’ as ‘Go-ETH’ in front of my English class – in my defence I’d never said it out loud before..and it sounded fine in my head! So to avoid this in the future – does anyone know the definitive pronunciation of ‘Chinua Achebe’?
Quick note about Don Quixote. The use of ‘kwicks ote’, though harsh to our ears, was the pronunciation used when the story appeared in England. It’s incorrect in light of Spanish, but for anyone reading the English translation who wants to speak of the text in its initial, serial form, ‘kwicks ote’ is the way to go. A holdover from this is in the word quixotic.
What about Jodi Picoult? I’ve heard “pi-COLT,” and “pee-COO,”
but I think it’s “pi-COE.”
So now I need to know. How is Mahala pronounced? I found this in my genealogy and thought it was either ‘muh hall uh’ or ‘muh hay la’ but wasn’t quite sure. And is Mahalia Jackson’s name pronounced the same or different?
EOIN COLFER — Eoin is pronounced like the English Owen or the Irish Eoghan.
How do you pronounce John Lescroart’s last name. We work in a public library and we want to pronounce author’s names correctly.
We really enjoy this site.
I’ve heard that “Mainwaring” (as in the Barbara Pym character) is pronounced “Mannering.”
Eoin is pronounce as Owen. :)
Picoult isPi-coe. :)
I’m bilingual, English/German. Goethe is tricky for Americans especially. “Gerta” or “Girtuh” are close, but don’t pronounce the “r” sound! Like in British “posh” English, the word “girl” sounds more like “gull” , but lengthened and very slightly nasalised.
Great discussion! Please forgive a non-author related question, but I’ve seen many Dutch names that begin with ” ‘t “. Anyone have any idea how to pronounce this?
I see the name Alcott at the top of the list. In Concord, Massachusetts, where she lived, Louisa May Alcott’s surname is pronounced AWL-cut, not AL-cot, like the tennis player’s.
The g’s in Borges’ name are phlegm-ish. Just FYI. Not pure “H” sounds. Closer to a Dutch g but not quite so “cough up a hairball” as that. All due respect to Dutch speakers (I’m a huge BLØF fan).
Fun stuff. I struggle with the names of some of my favorite authors all the time.
What about Anaïs Nin?
English uses the diaeresis mark (the double dot) in words such as naïve to tell you that the vowels do not form a dipthong but are to be pronounced separately. I think it’s the same with Anaïs. My guess is a-NAY-is.
Mostly the mark is dropped now; e.g. it used to be commonly used for daïs, and Zoë, and so on.
The Chicago street is & always has been pronounced “Go-thee”!
A few people did say “Go-Ee-Thee”, but they were a rarity.
What’s totally absurd is the automated voice on buses here says “Gare-ta” with the next stop being Burton, both sound similar.
The only reason the bus is “Gare-ta”, is that the previous head of the Chicago Transit Authority was of German descent & demanded that pronunciation.
But no one here says that, just as we pronounce “Buena St.” as “Bew-enn-a”!
It is, in fact, Shay-mus HEE-Knee. He knew my late husband and introduced himself to me with that pronunciation.
C. Max McGee and Michelle Barthelme:
I would never presume to tell anyone how to pronounce his or her name. However, I will say that Michael Silverblatt doesn’t pronounce it Bartle-may OR Barth-el-may. He pronounces it Barth-el-mee. Check out his interview with Dave Eggers here, minute 7:07. And as he says, Donald Barthelme was his friend and mentor, so he’d probably know:
http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw050210dave_eggers
Thor-ew for “Thereux”? I know it’s still an Americanized pronunciation, but where are they getting the “o”? Plus, in French names, syllables do not end in consonants. I don’t know if there’s meant to be an accent there, but if there is, in French it would be tay-roo; if not; teh-roo. The Americanized version would be the-roo, (soft th) not tho-roo.
How do you pronounce David Baldacci?
I’ve heard both Baldachee as well as Baldakee and I don’t which is right.
Where are you getting an “o” sound in Thereux? In French it would be Théreux, which sounds like tay-RUH (where the “uh” sound is like the u in “put.” The Americanized version would be more like thuh- (th sound as in “thistle) ruh (same “u” as in”put” or thuh-ROO. Not tho-roo.
The childrens’ author Rick Riordan. The surname is pronounced Ryer-dan and not Rhee-or-dan as I once thought.
Great post!
Eoin Colfer’s name is pronounced ‘Owen’ Colfer
Henry David Theroux. Kinfolk and followers near Walden Pond say THOR-oh. Most Americans say Tha-ROH.
Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s name is pronounced NGOO-gee (the NG is the same as it is in anger, and the second part is the same as ghee) WAH Thee-ong-oh (the TH as it is in ‘this’, and the ng is a soft one, as in bang).
There is no “IN” as suggested by Judson. I should know, I’m Kenyan
Thank you ever so much for this most precious pronunciation guide!