What’s on your bookshelf: The Quiet Year and Monsterhearts designer Avery Alder

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! We’re doing tabletop designers now, firstly because I think tabletop is cool and secondly…nope, that’s it. Every week we stray further from videogames, and every week we regain feeling in body parts we’d forgotten we had. Ten toes, you say? Marvellous.

This week, it’s The Quiet Year, Monsterhearts, Dream Askew, Dream Apart and many more’s Avery Alder! Cheers Avery! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

What are you currently reading?

The big one right now is Engines Of Desire, a heavy tome of Nordic LARP theory by Juhana Pettersson. It’s really strange and exciting to dive into the theory and insider baseball of a game design discipline that feels familiar but occasionally operates on logic that is totally alien to me. A lot of Juhana’s writing is dramatic, iconoclastic, and emotionally layered. There are some ideas that make me scrunch up my nose in disagreement, but a lot more than make me nod along excitedly.

What did you last read?

I start a lot of books, and then usually abandon them when I get distracted by something shiny. It’s actually pretty rare for me to finish a book. The most recent one was Psalm For The Wild-Built, by Becky Chambers. I love cozy stories about life after industrial collapse—anything that takes some of the conceits of the post-apocalyptic genre but runs in a utopian direction with them—and this unlikely odd couple story of a travelling tea monk and a feral robot was incredibly endearing. It’s also novella-length, which was probably a contributing factor to me finishing it! I haven’t yet picked up the sequel, A Prayer For The Crown-Shy, but I plan to at some point soon.

What are you eyeing up next?

I mostly want to finish the books that are already sitting on my nightstand, with a bookmark sticking out about a third of the way down. That includes The City In The Middle Of The Night by Charlie Jane Anders, A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine, and Bad Cree by Jessica Johns.

What quote or scene from a book sticks with you the most?

Lately, it’s been a scene from Michelle Tea’s Black Wave, which is sort of a queer dirtbag memoir that devolves into an apocalyptic story of humanity’s last gasp. It’s the scene where Michelle is standing in the DMV, learning that they don’t give out new drivers licenses any longer. It’s this very mundane and tedious moment that leads her to realize that the world is ending, and has been ending for a long time, but she’s been too preoccupied by messy breakups, roommate drama, parties, and drug addiction to realize it. It’s the moment when the memoir conceit starts to unravel.

What book do you find yourself bothering friends to read?

I have two answers to this one. The first is Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel. I first read Station Eleven about a decade ago, and I feel like it transformed me. It’s a post-apocalyptic story, but one about hope, community, and renewal. Emily St. John Mandel’s writing feels really precise and lyrical, and she’s a master at telling stories that feel innocuous and separate at first, but then coalesce into something interwoven and grand and profound. She does this in her other books too—The Glass Hotel is another example—but it’s just beautiful how Station Eleven tells a story about the world ending, and a story about the world beginning again, only for it to slowly become clear that they’re both part of the same bigger picture.

The other is This is How You Lose The Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. It’s an epistolary story about the reality-sculpting tug-of-war between two enemy agents of the time war, but more importantly, it’s about the feeling of finding someone who brings meaning back to your life and who pushes you to new heights. It’s short, poetically dense, queer, thirsty, and beautiful.

What book would you like to see someone adapt to a game?

This is a hard one! I feel like most of the books that I love already have been adapted into roleplaying games, or have roleplaying games that would easily map to their worldbuilding touchstones and narrative beats. I started to type out an answer about No Bad Parts, an introduction to Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy by Richard C. Schwartz. IFS introduces the idea that our mind is home to a whole family of different identities (or parts), and that when we feel ashamed or frustrated by those parts, we often close the door to empathy and healing. But then I remembered that Bluebeard’s Bride already exists, and it already explores everything I would want out of a game that was built upon the premises of IFS, and it does so while being a gorgeous, haunting game of gothic feminine horror. Which meant that I had to go back to my bookshelf to figure out a different answer.

So, uh… Wild Fermentation, by Sandor Katz.

Avery has naturally failed this column’s very secret goal of naming every book ever written, but succeeded in getting me to buy This is How You Lose The Time War. I’ll get to it after Invisible Cities. Then She’s Always Hungry. Then the Shadowdark core book. Then this bestiary I found with a giant six-headed goose that gives you ability to shoot flame “from an orifice of your choosing” after defeating and consuming it. Do you see what videogames have done to me? Book for now!