14 DAY TRIAL // When going into a new location while playing The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim my first though lie not with the enemies I might encounter or with the loot that I might get from them or from the various containers but with what books I might find inside and whether I have enough space to pick them up and carry them to a safe location to read them.
The books in this game are rich, mostly well written and often argue for or against positions, linked to the in-game world but also to real issues, and I often found myself standing in the middle of a lake, going through all the books in my inventory, patiently reading while my companion looks at me (I imagine bewildered by my actions).
The books also manage to be a great way for a newcomer to the series to understand the game world and learn why some things happen the way they do, while also allowing veterans to find new titbits of information that flesh out the Skyrim province and show how it is linked to the rest of the continent.
The problem with books is that, to me, it's never enough to read them but I have to own them, which means that, especially early while playing The Elder Scrolls V, I was pretty much forced to become a book thief, sneaking around houses and castles in order to get them from under the nose of their owners (it's not that I have seen any of them actually reading one).
There's just one important small change that developers at Bethesda need to make when it comes to the literature system in Skyrim: add a way of knowing when a book was read and when a multiple part series is complete in the inventory and available for reading.
And given the amount of stuff I need to carry around in the game it might also be nice to have book weight dropped down to zero but modders will probably soon take care of that.
Oh, and if you share my love of Skyrim books let me know how you handled the reading paradise that is the College of Mages.