<\/p>\n
Booked For The Week is our irregular chat with industry folk about the books they love, have loved, and are hoping to love in the future<\/p>\n
Hello reader who is also a reader! It’s time for another instalment of our winningly impromptu article series in which game developers discuss and marvel over books. Let us make the customary ritual sacrifice to Saint Nic Reuben, baron of words and founder of this column. Excelsior! And now, I turn the lectern over to Mariia Grygorovych, executive producer at GSC Game World, developers of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chornobyl and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl. Cheers, Mariia! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf? \n<\/p>\n
What are you currently reading?<\/strong> What are you eyeing up next?<\/strong> What quote or scene from a book sticks with you the most?<\/strong> From Viktor Frankl\u2019s Man\u2019s Search for Meaning: \u201cEverything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one\u2019s attitude in any given set of circumstances.\u201d Probably one of the most powerful thoughts about inner sovereignty. When the outer world collapses, one last thing remains – your stance.<\/p>\n What book do you find yourself bothering friends to read?<\/strong> What book would you like to see someone adapt to a game?<\/strong> This feels like a good opportunity to boost Unicef’s fund-raising campaign for Ukrainian children in wartime. I appreciate the connections Mariia makes here across psychiatry, fantasy and fable. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how trauma “lives” in the body, and the accompanying desire for a clean purge that can be quite self-destructive if you insist on it for too long. I’m not sure I’ve read anything recently that helps, but I do find walking guidebooks cathartically “bodiless” for the mild dissociation of attempting to visualise movements through unseen terrain. How about you – any books to share?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Booked For The Week is our irregular chat with industry folk about the books they love, have loved, and are hoping to love in the future Hello reader who is also a reader! It’s time for another instalment of our winningly impromptu article series in which game developers discuss and marvel over books. Let us<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4510,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[4089,206,4812,4810,4811,4809,4088,3826],"class_list":{"0":"post-4964","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-upcoming-games","8":"tag-bookshelf","9":"tag-game","10":"tag-grygorovych","11":"tag-gsc","12":"tag-mariia","13":"tag-s-t-a-l-k-e-r","14":"tag-whats","15":"tag-worlds"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4964\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nRight now I\u2019m reading The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. It\u2019s a book about how trauma doesn\u2019t end when the event is over. It keeps living inside a person – in the nervous system, in automatic reactions, in the way we build intimacy, in the very feeling of safety or its complete absence. Trauma isn\u2019t just a memory. It\u2019s a present state.
\nWhat did you last read?<\/strong>
\nI recently re-read Isaac Asimov\u2019s Foundation. There, too, it\u2019s about memory – but this time civilizational, not bodily. Can you predict the collapse of an empire? Can knowledge (even a fragment of it) save a culture? Every empire dies sooner or later. Ideas don\u2019t. I\u2019ve always been drawn to that scale: the individual and the system, freedom and predetermination, chaos and the desperate attempt to order it.
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\nClassic of Mountains and Seas (Shanhai Jing). I\u2019m pulled toward ancient texts not out of nostalgia, but out of respect for humanity\u2019s original imagination. Back when the world hadn\u2019t yet been dissected into rational pieces. When a monster was simply a way to name and explain a mountain. When the sea wasn\u2019t geography \u2013 it was myth, living threat, and mystery. I\u2019m curious how people constructed reality before science. Because we\u2019re still doing exactly the same thing – just with different tools.
<\/p>\n
\nFrom The Little Prince: \u201cAll grown-ups were once children\u2026 but only a few of them remember it.\u201d It\u2019s about the loss of the ability to see the essence behind the surface.<\/p>\n
\nEvgeny Schwartz\u2019s The Dragon. Because it\u2019s about the inner tyrant. About the collective habit of oppression. About how you can kill the dragon, but its shadow keeps living in people – sometimes even growing stronger. The ultimate takeaway: when you kill the dragon, the hardest part is not becoming the dragon yourself.
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\nThe Thousand and One Nights – in the original form. Scheherazade doesn\u2019t just tell stories. She changes reality with words. A story becomes a weapon. A story becomes a shield. A story becomes a way to postpone death – night after night. And if you weave together everything I\u2019m reading right now – the body that remembers trauma, dying civilizations, ancient myths, the freedom to choose one\u2019s attitude, the inner dragon – it all comes down to the same thing. To the human being as such. It\u2019s about memory, about the power of narrative, about how the world is always built from stories. And the only question is: who tells them, and how.<\/p>\n