Hello fellow readers, and welcome back to Book This Week – our regular chat about books with a selection of industry insiders! It is generally agreed that the longest novel ever written is Proust’s In Search of Lost Time – a wimp’s choice since it actually runs in 13 different volumes. But don’t let Proust’s dastardly lies taint your literary pleasure. He does have a fine mustache – a more important literary trait in my opinion than the actual writing.

This week, Martin Pichlmair, professor of games at ITU Copenhagen and co-founder of Breaking the Rules, is here! Cheers Martin! Do you mind if we take a look at your bookshelf?

What are you currently reading?

I’m currently over 1800 pages into Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. The three books in this trilogy are a long and wild journey into 17th century history. Within a few pages, it goes from swashbuckling pirate adventure to meditation on the birth of science. Then it adds slapstick comedy. and detailed social analysis. This is a book where you can get lost in it, which is certainly better than getting yourself into it, because almost everyone in the book is a nightmare to varying degrees.

What did you read last?

The most interesting book I have read recently is The Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Paviça, which is a unique experience: a dictionary that tells a story. You can read the same events from three perspectives by finding key words in three different dictionaries, and piece together what happened based on accounts of events by three different unreliable narrators. And then there’s a different story about the dictionary itself and its history. Everything is connected. If Wikipedia were a game, it would be in the form of this book.

What are you watching next?

I’m very much looking forward to Benjamin Labatut’s The Maniac, the fictional biography of John von Neumann. Labatu writes about science and its role in the world. But he boldly transcended the usual boundaries of biography. I think he was trying to write a historical account that was more true than pure fact, as the impact of past events reverberated through the text. It’s hard to explain, but I can definitely recommend his earlier work When We No Longer Know the World.

Which sentence or scene in the book impressed you the most?

This isn’t a specific scene, but one thing I love is when a book points to a whole world that exists just out of sight. The origins of the “excess” of title-granting (Ian M. Banks). The ecosystem beneath the mines of Moria is easily disturbed by stones thrown into the cave (JRR Tolkien). Cities beyond the edges of the medieval map fascinate the characters in Umberto Eco’s Baudolino. These places are important to me because I myself am tempted to fill them with magical creatures, like “there are dragons here.” Oh, and there’s the line “That was the day my grandmother exploded” (Crow Road, Iain Banks) – what a conversation starter!

What book do you find yourself interrupting your friends to read?

I keep telling everyone to read The End of Everything by Katie Mack, a nonfiction masterpiece about all the ways our universe could (and will one day) end. This book succeeds in the miraculous trick of telling you directly that all of existence could end in the blink of an eye, while at the same time giving you a lot of hope because it takes your perspective away from small everyday problems. Worries turned into worries about life. It’s these little themes that certainly make Negative Space (BR Yeager) so enjoyable, and I’d like to take this opportunity to double down on what I wrote about in this space last week: it’s the best social realist horror film I’ve ever read and I’ve made it in I Can Yell from any dilapidated rooftop you find.

Which book would you like to see adapted into a game?

It’s a children’s book, or basically a YA book, but ever since I read it when I was about 12, I’ve thought of Astrid Lindgren’s The Lionheart Brothers Great for gaming. This is the only book I know of that uses the concept of permanent death (which, oddly enough, is a less permanent form of death). That was in 1974.

In fact, I’ve given up trying to count the number of books my guests mention to see how close they are to naming every book they’ve ever written. I’ve become very good at spotting failures in accomplishing the very secret goals of this column, so a quick glance is all it takes. Yet, I kept going. Some say he is the bravest man in gaming media. Book now!