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?

What are you currently reading?

Right now I’m reading The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. It’s a book about how trauma doesn’t 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’t just a memory. It’s a present state.

What did you last read?

I recently re-read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. There, too, it’s 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’t. I’ve always been drawn to that scale: the individual and the system, freedom and predetermination, chaos and the desperate attempt to order it.

What are you eyeing up next?

Classic of Mountains and Seas (Shanhai Jing). I’m pulled toward ancient texts not out of nostalgia, but out of respect for humanity’s original imagination. Back when the world hadn’t yet been dissected into rational pieces. When a monster was simply a way to name and explain a mountain. When the sea wasn’t geography – it was myth, living threat, and mystery. I’m curious how people constructed reality before science. Because we’re still doing exactly the same thing – just with different tools.

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

From The Little Prince: “All grown-ups were once children… but only a few of them remember it.” It’s about the loss of the ability to see the essence behind the surface.

From Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” Probably one of the most powerful thoughts about inner sovereignty. When the outer world collapses, one last thing remains – your stance.

What book do you find yourself bothering friends to read?

Evgeny Schwartz’s The Dragon. Because it’s 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.

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

The Thousand and One Nights – in the original form. Scheherazade doesn’t 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’m reading right now – the body that remembers trauma, dying civilizations, ancient myths, the freedom to choose one’s attitude, the inner dragon – it all comes down to the same thing. To the human being as such. It’s 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.

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?