Mark Athitakis has some interesting things to say about the reading he got done on a recent trip to Nova Scotia:

I left with Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives, a collection of personal essays, reporting, and essays on video games, and Karl Marlantes’ Matterhorn, a hefty novel set during the Vietnam War. The two have a lot to say to each other, it turns out. Both to a large extent wrestle with the same question: How do you tell a story about combat without boring people?