Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week – our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! As a reward for sticking with this column for so long, I’m delighted to announce that we’ll soon be rolling out the chance for you to write in with a detailed list of all your most subversive ideas and which books inspired you to hold them, and in return I’ll send you an email alert if those books ever appear in this column. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is widely considered a classic so I’ll just call it ‘McCarthyism’ for simplicity.
This week, it’s the co-founder of Finji – publisher of such luxury games as Tunic, Wilmot’s Warehouse, and Night In The Woods – Bekah Saltsman! Cheers Bekah! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
What are you currently reading?
I am currently rereading The Throne Of Glass series by Sarah J. Maas and am on Tower of Dawn – which is book six by some counts of the series (seven if you include Assassin’s Blade). I first read these during the pandemic and with all of my travel to DICE and GDC in February and March, I wanted to read something fun. I am usually also reading a nonfiction book. I’m in the middle of Selling Sexy: Victoria’s Secret and the Unraveling Of An American Icon by Lauren Sherman and Chantal Fernandez.
What did you last read?
A lot. Technically it was the other five books before Tower of Dawn, but I re-read the first two Fourth Wing books so I could remember what was going on in Onyx Storm. And before that I read Heartless Hunter by Kristen Ciccarelli, and all of The Bone Shard War books by Andrea Stewart. I have to call out the last non-fiction book I read because it was amazing – The Forbidden Garden: The Botanists Of Besieged Leningrad And Their Impossible Choice by Simon Parkin. I love Simon’s books and you all should read them.
What are you eyeing up next?
Hard question. This will really depend on my headspace after GDC- if I feel really anxious I will likely read Emily Wilde’s Map Of The Otherlands because everything in the first of this series was ridiculous in a good way. Or maybe Briarheart by Mercedes Lackey. If I am feeling up for a bit more angst I have been sitting on the Scholomance books by Novik for a hot minute and they have been recommended to me over and over again. For my next nonfiction- I have been putting off reading The Dawn Of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow, but it’s 526 pages with pages and pages of notes so it will be a dense read. I do have Frank Lantz’s The Beauty of Games on my to read list and I know I will love it.
What quote or scene from a book sticks with you the most?
As you can probably tell I read a lot and have always read a lot. Picking one scene feels impossible – I remember the first time I read through Lord Of The Rings and I got to the end when Frodo is departing on the ships, I cried way more than was reasonable. There is also a line in Persuasion by Jane Austin that lives rent free in my head when Anne Elliott says “all the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one, you need not covet it) is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.”
Persuasion is the one novel that Austen wrote that is at it’s foundation deeply sad. It was Austen’s last novel and you can tell. I could definitely go on (does anyone want to be bored as I holler about the scenes in Twelfth Night that I love?) but I won’t.
What book do you find yourself bothering friends to read?
This one is dumb but it is a book about parenting kids called The Explosive Child by Ross Greene. It has given me and Adam so many tools on how to respectfully parent our teen and preteen kids.
What book would you like to see someone adapt to a game?
I would love to see something like Persuasion or Emma or Pride And Prejudice adapted into a game. I don’t care if you bend the setting, and even the physical stakes to the main character (there is a reason Pride and Prejudice And Zombies was a book). But keep the foundational aspects of societal rules, intrigue and conversational strategy – what comes out on the other side of that? I would love to play that game.
The Parasol Protectorate by Gail Carriger is exactly the type of modern and witty book series that feels like it pulls from Austen’s foundational writing but is endlessly fun and funny while also being both a book with action and inaction. The characters are *chef’s kiss*- I would play the heck out of that game.
As a bonus added feature of ‘McCarthyism’, anyone who successfully meets this column’s goal of naming every book in existence will be immediately shot. Luckily, that goal is a secret, so it hopefully won’t come to that. Book for now!
