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! I woke from a terrible nightmare last night. I’d just released a book and every three or so pages, the publisher had inserted a double page spread trying to sell the reader a wireless mouse with Minecraft movie Jack Black’s gormless, gouty grin on it, turning my carefully curated atmosphere to shit! Phew. Thank goodness it was just a nightmare! Just an utter, utter nightmare.
Anyway, never mind all that. The sun is out, and books still exist and are mostly advertisement free! Here to talk about them this week is game maker, Dicey Dungeons writer, Now Play This festival founder, and The Husbands author, Holly Gramazio! Cheers Holly! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
What are you currently reading?
I’m halfway through my friend Elizabeth Lovatt’s book Thank You For Calling The Lesbian Line, which is so good — it’s a mix of queer history and memoir and a bunch of little specific stories about a 1990s lesbian helpline, and the people who called it and the people who volunteered there.
What did you last read?
I just finished Laura Jean McKay’s The Animals In That Country. It’s set during a pandemic and it was published in 2020, which is either great or terrible timing for McKay, not sure which. In the book, infected people gain the ability to understand animals — to read their scents, postures, noises. The story follows a woman who works at a wildlife park in Australia — which it turns out isn’t a great place to be when suddenly everyone can understand the wildlife. Anyway, she ends up on a big road trip with a dingo. I loved it; “talking animals” must be such a challenge to write but McKay finds a really great tone for them that’s kind-of somewhere between prose and poetry and puzzle.
What are you eyeing up next?
I’m excited for Hanna Thomas Uose’s Who Wants To Live Forever, which just came out this Thursday — it’s set at a time when a drug that dramatically extends people’s lifespans is just beginning to be available, and it’s about a couple, Yuki and Sam, where one of them decides to take the drug, and the other doesn’t. I’ve only flicked through the first ten pages so far but I’ve heard great things.
What quote or scene from a book sticks with you the most?
Ooh, it’s got to be something from when I was a kid, I think – the books you read when you’re little really can squirrel away into your brain and make a home there. I think probably it’s the scene in C.S. Lewis’s Voyage Of The Dawn Treader where Lucy casts a spell to hear what people are saying about her behind her back, and she hears one of her friends trying to impress an older girl by being mean. And basically it messes up a friendship needlessly, unfixably. I don’t know why but that scene really really stuck with me! Whenever I have an urge to look up reviews of something I’ve worked on I just think no, no, remember Lucy in the weird house.
What book do you find yourself bothering friends to read?
It definitely changes year to year, but last year I bought multiple copies of Rebecca K Reilly’s Greta & Valdin and Ferdia Lennon’s Glorious Exploits to foist on people. Greta & Valdin is a contemporary comedy set in New Zealand, and I gave it to people who were a bit stressed and fretful and who I thought would enjoy spending time with some slightly awkward, funny, real-feeling characters, where there’d be a lot of emotions going on but you could be pretty sure that nothing would go extremely wrong. And Glorious Exploits is a very full-on tragicomedy written in Hiberno-English, set in ancient Syracuse, about theatre and art and war, and I gave that to people and basically just said “fucking hell look at this, you don’t see how he can make it work but he does”.
What book would you like to see someone adapt to a game?
I once heard v buckenham (who made Downpour) say that she thought Susannah Clarke’s Piranesi would be a great videogame, and ever since I’ve desperately wished someone would make it. The setting of Piranesi is incredible: an endless house filled with statues and tides, strange things to discover, journeys to go on, rhythms of the world to get used to, birds, fish, resources to scavenge and live from. I want to play it so much!
Holly has a newsletter (the best way to consume the internet) here. Who knows? If you sign up to it, she may eventually name every book ever written, although her failure to do so today puts her in fine company with every other guest we’ve had so far. Sometimes I wonder why I bother, but then Jack Black’s gormless, gouty grin shines out from my unbeatable value wireless mouse and makes everything better. Book for now!
