Good at reading

In early 2025, a notice was posted in the FAQ section of Luigi Mangione: Legal Defense Information:

Due to the overwhelming generosity of members of the public, numerous books have already been mailed to Luigi. He is very appreciative, but kindly asks that people temporarily refrain from sending more books. The number of books he can possess at any given time is limited.

According to BOP Program Statement 5580.08 (Inmate Personal Property), the limits are:

• Books (5)
• Photo Album / Scrap book (1)
• Photos 4x6 single-sided (25)

Please note that wardens have discretion to adjust these limits.

Within the multifarious, opinion-piece-generating, online fandom of Mangione, this request from his lawyers went a little under the radar. Not so his briefly public Goodreads account, which received intense attention in some circles following Mangione's arrest in December 2024. As LitHub asked at the time, "What Can We Really Learn About the UHC CEO's Alleged Killer Based on the Books He's Read?" Their answer? Not much. Yet podcasts, newsletters, and articles fluttered around Mangione's reading and rating of The Lorax, several tech-bro nonfiction titles, the Unabomber's manifesto, and a handful of self-help books.

This essay is not about the divisive figure of Mangione, the reactions to his arrest, or the crimes he has been accused of. I want only to begin by confessing how moved I still am by the "overwhelming generosity" referred to by Mangione's lawyers—the implied deluge of books. And to further confess how much time I've spent not only wondering which books have been sent, but also what the senders wish the reading of those books would do for and to Mangione while he is held at a detention center in New York. Novels sent to absorb or distract? Prison literature with which to identify? Political theory to affirm? The Lorax for comfort? My daydreams move irresistibly down a checklist indicating "reading for pleasure," as variously defined and decried by literary critics: absorption, identification, consolation. "Pleasure" feels a misnomer here, of course, as it sometimes does in discussions of reading literature. But whichever books I imagine being sent, and for whatever reasons, I see hope in the action of sending. Hope for—and a belief in—what reading might offer to a stranger.

* * *

I've been writing about reading for a few years; most recently, about intense and interpersonal literary reception. Reading as a form of connection, generous modes of interpretation, instantiations of ideated reading communities. The longer I've pottered around this broad topic of reading with others, which grew out of straightforwardly academic research I was once paid to do as a literary studies research fellow, the more personal the work has become. The move away from a purely critical project began when I published a couple of essays on how or when reading literature is represented as a form of labor. As I picked anxiously at connections between when one reads for work (e.g. as a teacher and researcher in higher education) and how one reads for work (e.g. the methods and habits of so-called critical, academic, or "professional" reading), my own professional future became more uncertain. It got clearer and clearer that I wasn't going to be reading for work much longer, and I let that context creep right into my arguments. It changed how I write about reading.

For this essay, I am interested in what is wanted from reading. Or maybe, what our reading wants. But not specific uses or outcomes of reading; instead, I am searching for gestures towards a broader, future-facing hope for something that we might find in reading with, or for, others.

In chasing this vaguely defined topic my thoughts have taken me away from Mangione's collective of book-senders and to an experimental novel about reading groups, a video game about healthcare debt, a poem written in an Excel spreadsheet, and the content management system of a university's public website. I won't try to deny a certain bagginess to what I'm threading together, nor am I particularly worried about tightening up my focus. I like the looseness. I like how it allows me to sit in another precious kind of hope, surely familiar to anyone else who enjoys trying to write or speak about books. Sensing that there is a link to be made, an argument to chase, but as yet incapable of articulating that connection, we continue thinking and feeling and responding on faith or instinct. This essay is my attempt to sit in that happy uncertainty a little longer.

* * *

ARE YOU TIRED OF INVENTION, TIRED OF HISTORY, DO YOU FEEL THAT YOU'RE ALL
OUT OF FIGHT? COME SIT AND READ ANGRY THINGS WITH OTHER ANGRY PEOPLE.
MAYBE IT WILL FEEL LIKE LOVE. NO FASCISTS. BEER. COFFEE. FREE.¹

This enticing advertisement for a reading group appears in Anna Moschovakis' Participation (2022). An experimental novel purportedly about bad jobs and collective reading in the face of disaster, Participation was assigned reading for me: one of a long list of books-about-reading. After a stuttering start, as I grumpily resisted the novel's occasional heavy-handedness ("There is a stack of books—on a coffee table, for example. An archive of future attention, or else a morgue."² A morgue?), I found a lightly drawn and vague world in which our sometimes narrator E belongs to two quite different reading groups. One such group, "Love," has a malleable "syllabus" that includes Milton, Freud, Sedgwick, hooks, and is often neglected by our narrator.³ The second reading group, "Anti-Love" (once advertised adeptly above, before the events of the novel), has had a more rigid syllabus of essays, until recently: "we've been so careful about power sharing that everyone is reluctant to weigh in on what to read next."⁴

Avoiding specifics wherever possible, many of Participation's characters are pronoun-less and referred to by initials or labels. E even describes their own dislike for specificity in books: how they can feel "kicked out" when reading, if their desire for identification is disrupted by an inconvenient detail.⁵ Accordingly, in Participation E holds three ambiguous jobs and shuttles between a nameless city and a nameless village. As Jess Bergman puts it in a review for Bookforum, particularity is eschewed by Moschovakis in favour of the schematic, with "characters, scenarios and settings [...] corresponding to types if they correspond to anything at all."⁶ There is a satisfying shock then, when, just under halfway through the book, something specific imposes itself: a storm hits. A broken bridge. A flood. And in the aftermath, the nominally opposed readings groups Love and Anti-Love merge.

They tried combining their syllabi, and then they tried rewriting them, and then they threw all the drafts in a pile. When they gathered, they asked for help and they let off steam, and sometimes they read aloud. They moved in with each other and swapped spots until it worked.⁷

Before the storm, reading in Participation is represented as neglected, interrupted, anxious; the protagonist E avoids the syllabus for Love, while Anti-Love appears to have stalled. As a result, though the plot tells us that reading brings people together in friendship, sex, and romance, the only reading we are really shown is done by E alone. And even as Love and Anti-Love do eventually unite in the crisis of the flood, the promise of collective reading remains frustratingly unfulfilled by the narrative. Shared books are mentioned, questions are asked about protecting one another from fear. But no meaningful specifics—emotional, intellectual, or practical—of this reading group experiment are ever really given. By merging their groups, does their reading change? Do the effects of reading change? How does it feel, reading together anew? What does it provide?

So, what we're left with instead—perhaps the most interesting aspect of the novel—is the unexplored and unarticulated question of what these readers want from reading together, when the town is cut off, the postal service has stopped, and it's unclear how much longer there will be electricity. What do these characters hope reading might help them with, at a time of disaster?

And what of our own reading? Participation routinely tests readers' focus and comfort through its form. With devices such as direct second-person addresses, narrative asides, and extended subclauses, the novel attempts to underscore our interaction, collaboration, or (fine!) participation as readers. This roughly echoes some of the thematic concerns of the novel: "Do you think I'll ever finish reading another book?" asks E.⁸ But its form, from its vagueness to its digressions, also imposes a kind of distance. To put it bluntly: it's hard to care what happens to these nameless, shapeless characters.

I almost didn't finish Participation; almost failed its tests. I'm at least partly to blame. I arrived at its pages with expectations. I wanted more about reading as a collective, en masse, and more about what that kind of reading has to do with responsibilities, support, relationality.

And while reading Participation, my thoughts repeatedly reached out to something else: a text-driven, point-and-click adventure video game titled Kentucky Route Zero (KRZ). Like Participation, the game features a group response to a catastrophic flood. And beyond shared themes of environmental disaster and community forming, Participation and KRZ also explore similar issues through form: reading, choice, attention, involvement. But where one might find cold distance in Participation, in KRZ reading is attentive, earnest, even anxious.

The narrative of Participation doesn't appear to be interested in how reading might help at times of collective crisis—it is just presumed that it can and will. KRZ raises deeper, odder, more difficult and therefore more appealing questions about reading, community, agency, power, systems, change. Questions unresolved, maybe painful, definitely far more affecting. Can reading only soothe distress, or can it protect us from it? Can reading be futile? Where does hope lie, in reading?

* * *

Released episodically by indie developers Cardboard Computer between 2013 and 2020, KRZ is a game about making a delivery. As players we start as an old man named Conway, with a van full of antiques to deliver: his final job. To find the delivery address, we must locate and navigate a secret highway—Route Zero—that runs through massive cave systems underneath Kentucky. The journey, across five acts and several interludes, manages to take in impenetrable bureaucracy, an underground river, healthcare debt, indentured servitude, installation art, and community television. The game is strange, and beautiful, and much, much more than I can describe here.

I've labelled KRZ a text-driven game. It certainly shares DNA with foundational and contemporary interactive text games such as 1977's Colossal Cave Adventure or 2013's Queers in Love at the End of the World, by which I mean that the game's key motors are text-based choices made by the player: reading and selecting text is how players move the game and its branching narrative forward. Unlike Queers in Love and its text-only ilk, KRZ also features gorgeous artwork and animation, and we can move characters and vehicles around the game's eery locations. But the text, along with the ways in which we read and respond to it, remain central to KRZ.

I'm not quite going to go ahead and define gaming as reading, though others have with convincing results (including within a brilliant Contemporaries cluster, "Reading Disco Elysium"). Reading is simply an inescapable and core element of how we as players interact with KRZ at the game's person-screen interface. Rather than get bogged down in whether this is "instructional" reading or... something else, I want to try and communicate how this game has caused me to reflect on what I might want or expect from acts of reading. How the mechanics of KRZ, and the way they relate to the game's events, have unsettled my thinking on interpersonal reading, and on questions around control, issues of work, states of upheaval.

Reading in/of KRZ goes from attentive, to strained, to (for me at least) stressed. It's reading in the fraught service of fictional others. A player is highly, if uncertainly, involved: we have many choices to make, but it is unclear with what effect. Classic interactive text games are built on action-led and distinct options, with clear outcomes: the basic blocks of a branching narrative system. Do you take the mountain road, or go through the forest? While these sorts of questions do exist in KRZ, we're more likely to face options that are far less explicit in terms of both choice and outcome. Let's take two examples.

CONWAY: You don't have to talk about it.
CONWAY: What did you find down there?⁹

We can look at this choice and get a sense of the possible outcomes, i.e. we'll get more or less information. Compare that sense with this moment of decision for Conway's inner dialogue:

It wasn't going to happen.
It was pointless.¹⁰

What is the difference between these two statements? Why are we being asked to choose?

This recurring haziness might lead an invested player to careful, earnest reading: scrutinizing the words, linguistic differences, or syntactical implications, and laboring over decisions. Are there clues to be found, if I read closely enough? Can I predict consequences from these snippets of text? This turns stressful as we care more and more about the collection of characters that assemble around Conway: we learn about their lives and difficulties, and—crucially—we make choices for them all, hopping between their different perspectives and roles. As we become increasingly responsible for the group, we worry about their collective fate.

Responsibility might suggest agency, or control. An important part of many video games is the feedback system: what has been the impact of my actions, my decisions? Have I gained Experience, lost Health, or affected a narrative outcome? We get none of this in KRZ, and some of our several hundreds of choices turn out to make no difference at all. Towards the end of Act One, for example, our delivery driver Conway has an accident. When asked by another character "Are you hurt?", our options are:

CONWAY: It's all messed up.
CONWAY: It's fine.¹¹

No matter which option we choose, it's not fine. A central narrative thread of the game then runs from this injury we cannot prevent, to surgery, to healthcare debt, and ultimately to debt bondage and abduction. Nothing we can do to stop it, no choice smart enough, no reading effective enough.

When the characters of KRZ encounter their own text-based computer game, a young boy delivers his (or your) verdict on the gameplay experience:

EZRA: Kind of boring, but I like boring stuff sometimes.
EZRA: There's a lot of reading, but I'm really good at that anyway.¹²

I am a bad gamer. I don't mind this at all usually, as I button-mash with abandon and turn left instead of right. But I felt confronted as I realized my labored decisions in KRZ were not averting disasters. If I had read better, with more care, couldn't I have changed the outcome? (Aren't I "professionally" trained in reading?) KRZ takes arguably core concepts of text-driven games—a narrative to create, cause and effect, being good at reading—to portray a world of looming crises. An unread bill, a subprime mortgage. Unemployment, evictions. And our reading follows.

* * *

KRZ has been described as an "interactive screenplay"¹³ and a "poetry-generator,"¹⁴ leading critics and reviewers to argue that players take on an authorial role in the game.¹⁵ While I can't deny that there are points in KRZ where we do literally choose lines of poetry or lyrics of songs, I think that comparisons of the general gameplay with what authors do seriously underestimate what readers do. Creativity does not reside with authors alone. A 2024 poem by writer and social commentator Keiran Goddard might help me to illustrate this. In 'for work/ for rest.xls', Goddard plots a poem across an Excel spreadsheet: "one lemma per day, five days a week, for forty-seven weeks of the year."¹⁶

before	work	begins	work	begins
glass	building	airless	wet	fetid

Read in one way, the poem deals with the restrictions of dull paid work in relation to unpaid creative labour: a poem about being a writer, about authorship, about creativity stymied by hours spent in a lifeless office. But as readers we're also surely invited to mess around with the mechanics of reading, go line by line or plot a path up/down/across the 235 cells. If we had access to the original Excel file, we could feasibly even read via custom sort or filter commands—yielding further fractured, beautiful results.

In an early interlude of KRZ titled Limits and Demonstrations, three characters move around an art exhibition. Facing one interactive exhibit, we have the following dialogue choice to make:

EMILY: How does it work?
EMILY: What's it about?

I think the "how does it work?" of Goddard's poem loosens the apparent "what's it about?". I see a choose-your-own-poem adventure for the reader, and this emphasis on the reader points towards a creativity that remains available, despite deprivations or constraints. There are reading options, within a limited data set.

Of course, reading in the context of bad, compromised, or precarious jobs is also an unavoidable feature of both Participation and KRZ. E's work in Participation is "paid, unpaid, underpaid": their jobs (café worker, corporate events organizer, trainee mediator) are stop-start and geographically dispersed.¹⁷ Time and place remain murky in the pre-storm sections of the novel, as we try to keep track while E shuttles between work and time-share rented rooms. Labor is a more significant focus of KRZ, as are the specifics of precarity: invoices are chased, jobs are automated, ethical employment is dreamt of. And as in Participation, work is often temporary or piecemeal. On our travels with Conway, we encounter an administrator-slash-revered-artist, an experimental playwright turned energy company henchman, a computer researcher who once wrote novels.

In the background of many lost or terrible jobs in KRZ is what's referred to only as "the university"—a transitory space, nearly always in past tense. Depending on a player's decisions, we might read mentions in dialogue of research funding cuts, nefarious academic politics, redeployments, unsuccessful grant applications, crippling student loans. In my most recent playthrough, "the university" felt like a prominent backstory for the disparate community represented in the game—something I did not remember noticing previously. I must accept that my specific choices might have, this time, bent the game's narrative toward what is an otherwise minor element. My decisions within the game do have an impact: if not preventing any crises, then at least reflecting some of my own concerns back at me. So, if I chose this route, always selecting to invest in the narrative of the university—what have I missed?

* * *

For anyone unfamiliar with the state of higher education in the UK, I strongly recommend a quick look at the UK HE Shrinking page maintained by a branch of the University and College Union. Restructuring and compulsory redundancies have meant widespread job losses in academic and professional services roles at UK universities for several years. A 2026 analysis of Higher Education Statistics Agency data confirms what many of us already knew: the disproportionate impact of cuts on English literature and language, and on the humanities more broadly.

In my current job, I make webpages for research staff at a small, north London university. Much of my time is spent navigating a content management system: the behind-the-scenes building blocks of a website. Cascades of section folders and content types, neatly arranged and connected, to form the university's public online face. Old content is expired and archived, tucked away but not deleted. So, every now and then, I come across archived content from restructured, reduced, or discontinued humanities subject areas and degrees. An expired blurb for a now defunct English Literature degree, for example, that once expounded the benefits of studying literature. Within the institutional website architecture, I can read the traces of several rounds of job cuts made years ago (long before my time). Decisions made. Routes closed off.

I promised something vague and uncertain. I am optimistically prospecting my way through loose connections and associations, seeking that ill-defined hope for something in reading. While Participation lightly considers reading with others, KRZ goes much further, asking what it means to read for others: to have a responsibility, to worry about positive change. In their different ways, however, both novel and game leave me with the question of how reading matters. To us, to others, to a crisis. How can creative reading, care, and connection make a difference? I'm shying away from answers. Or maybe I'm just keeping my options open.

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Sophie Corser (@sccorser) is a writer living in Essex, in the UK. Her essays have appeared in journals and magazines including The Pig's Back, Too Little/ Too Hard, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Textual Practice, and elsewhere. Her first book, The Reader's Joyce, is about literary interpretation and critical authority. She's now working on a book of memoir and criticism about reading.

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References

1. Anna Moschovakis, Participation (Coffee House Press, 2022), 47. ↩︎
2. Moschovakis, Participation, 4. ↩︎
3. Moschovakis, 58-59. ↩︎
4. Moschovakis, 47. ↩︎
5. Moschovakis, 66 ↩︎
6. Jess Bergman, "The Groups," review of Participation, by Anna Moschovakis, Bookforum, Dec/Jan/Feb 2023. ↩︎
7. Moschovakis, 186. ↩︎
8. Moschovakis, 119. ↩︎
9. Kentucky Route Zero: TV Edition for Nintendo Switch, Cardboard Computer, 2022. All references are to this edition. ↩︎
10. Kentucky Route Zero. ↩︎
11. Kentucky Route Zero. ↩︎
12. Kentucky Route Zero. ↩︎
13. Ryan Rigney, "Kentucky Route Zero: Lost in a Surreal, Terrifying American South," Wired, 4 March 2013, https://www.wired.com/2013/03/kentucky-route-zero/. ↩︎
14. Tom Marks, review of Kentucky Route Zero, IGN, 28 May 2021, https://www.ign.com/articles/kentucky-route-zero-review. ↩︎
15. See Austin Walker, "'Kentucky Route Zero' Pays Off on Nine Years of Hope and Doubt," Vice, January 28 2020, https://www.vice.com/en/article/kentucky-route-zero-pays-off-on-nine-years-of-hope-and-doubt-review/ and Linda Joyce, "Kentucky Route Zero, Or, How Not to Get Lost in the Branching Narrative System," in The Play Versus Story Divide in Game Studies: Critical Essays, ed. Matthew Wilhelm Kapell (McFarland, 2016), 20. ↩︎
16. Livia Franchini and Lucy Mercer, 'Editorial', Too Little/ Too Hard 3, Summer 2024. ↩︎
17. Moschovakis, 15. ↩︎