If you have any complaints which you'd like to make, I'd be more than happy to send you the appropriate forms.
Monday, February 28, 2022
Books: The Personal Librarian
Our book club's second read was The Personal Librarian, a historical fiction novel by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray. The book is about Belle da Costa Greene, the personal librarian of J.P. Morgan and later director of the Pierpont Morgan Library. There are some dramatic liberties taken with Belle's life, but the central dilemma of the novel is entirely real: Belle was born Black but passes for White, a closely guarded secret that if ever discovered, would ruin Belle and her family.
The Personal Librarian was okay, but it felt slight compared to our previous book club choice. Belle deals with conniving art dealers, Gilded Age excess, and even a dash of bodice-ripping romance, but in the end, there's a limit on how exciting reading about the life of even a very famous librarian can be.
My friend and I have been playing Techland's open world zombie games for more than a decade now, and we were really looking forward to their latest one, Dying Light 2. The E3 trailer from years ago promised a complex, living world that changed and reacted according to your choices, along with all the bloody melee combat and freewheeling parkour that defined the first game:
Regrettably, the finished product falls far short of that over-ambitious (some would say misleading) tease. Dying Light 2 instead plays out much like the first game - you are an itinerant courier, a "Pilgrim," dropped into a post-apocalyptic zombie infested city, pitted against a mysterious mad scientist adversary. There are two factions you can ally with, a few choices you can make along the way, and a couple different ending cutscenes, but by and large the story plays out the same each time.
At least the parkour system is back. Like in the first Dying Light,you can run, jump, climb through the city at will, limited only by your stamina meter and the skills you have unlocked. Towards the end, the developers throw some vertigo-inducing, death-defying climbs at you, which are the game's best moments. If you invest in the skill tree, you can bounce off of walls like a hyper-caffeinated David Belle (who actually plays a main character in the game),
In most ways, however, Dying Light 2 is a step back. The melee combat feels less satisfying, the character physics and animation are less realistic, and the shiny new ray-tracing technology in the engine can't hide all the bugs and glitches (Techland games are fairly polished overall, but have moments of inexplicable jankiness). If you have a friend who will co-op the whole campaign with you, there's really nothing like it out there, but otherwise, you may want to wait until the game is patched and the price drops.
