There are two other books I've been juggling both pre-and-post Little Book of Sound Chips—Suzanne LeBlanc's Cassiar: A Jewel in the Wilderness and Richard Moss's Shareware Heroes. The former of which I started reading about a year ago when I did a search for Cassiar, British Columbia on the web. This was a little bit after I watched the above episode from LoadingReadyRun's Road Quest—a show in which some members from the LoadingReadyRun crew take a cross-province trip from Victoria to Dawson City, Yukon, partly inspired by the grand-scale trips from UK's TopGear. (...and The Grand Tour by proxy.)
Frequent readers will already know of my love for this comedy troupe turned video-production house and the impact they had on me personally throughout the years. This RoadQuest episode, where they make a brief detour to where Cassiar used to be, would be no different and then some.
It's an episode that has inspired me to start out a new writing project, shortly after my new laptop arrived in the post. So I thought that it would be best to try and find more information about the abandoned mining town myself to ensure that it gets accurately represented. Or in the case of a science fiction comedy novel, accurately represented and properly honored.
Of course, getting back into video games hasn't helped my reading much, if not at all. Even if it lead me to my first paid writing piece, it's hard to focus on other things as I noted in the Little Book of Sound Chips review. In short, it has to be all about the console or computer and the game one decides to play. Although with the Nintendo Switch, I can sometimes get away with putting a podcast on in the background with games like Stardew Valley or Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild where the music, sound-effects, and even some voice acting* can be a little too repetitive at times.
Last summer, when I started walking to the restaurant, Puffins, for lunch, I would usually take a couple books with me. One of those books was Cassiar: A Jewel in the Wilderness and I remember belting through a few chapters...at least one per outing before my food showed up. I may do a brief, travel blog-like entry on the place since the food and company are both great. The organization that runs Puffins, Seabird Enterprises, helps those with physical and developmental handicaps find and maintain employment so the money does go towards a good cause.
But I digress, and when last fall arrived along with Persona 5 Royal I would completely forget about finishing the foray into Canadian history. Weirdly enough, I started reading through a couple of manga books shortly after beating the game—mostly JoJo's Bizarre Adventure (Part 4) and Fist of the North Star. It was that brief binge, alongside going back to Mastodon, which prompted me to add the Little Book of Sound Chips to last year's poll. With the book being the winner, I thought that I could use this book review as the first step to get myself back into reading proper.
Slowly, but surely, it is. I think that Jazalyn's three books will also aid this immensely.
Audiobook-wise, I'm listening to Chokepoint Capitalism by Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin. It is a book which deals with how artists, musicians, and content creators at large inherently have become dependent on Big Tech, like Spotify and Amazon, alongside how those very same companies mistreat said creators. I'm almost at the point in which both Doctorow and Giblin outline solutions to mitigate the companies "flywheels" as they call them to ensure that content creators get their proper share of royalties while also making the creative market more competitive. I'm excited to see what they propose!
I have to admit that audiobooks have also helped in aiding this road back to literature between new reads, like Lindsay Ellis's Axiom's End and putting on a couple of Douglas Adams's books when rough work days happen. I've had them in the background during some gaming sessions as well.
Either way, you could call it a "Book Quest" from gaming's Mememtos to literature's Ursa Minor Beta!
*This isn't true for Breath of the Wild, which is perfectly playable without a pod or audiobook for the game's serene atmosphere and minimalist score. Sometimes, Persona 3 & 4 do fit that bill of repetition though.
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