Space Marine 2

Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to What's On Your Bookshelf?, Jank's twice monthly chat with a selection of beer-battered, triple-cooked game-makers about books.

I saw another take today about "breaking out of your reading comfort zone". It's one I see quite frequently and am broadly supportive of, though only for a certain type of person. Generally speaking, the worst possible advice you can give someone who isn't reading as much as they'd like is "have you tried reading shit you're not excited about?".

I'm increasingly of the opinion that every piece of reading or writing advice on the correct way to do something outside of the purely actionable (you will probably need a keyboard if you want to make words happen on a computer, etc) contributes to a growing state of paralysis over doing that thing the right way. A plea, then, to reject the tyranny of correctness and simply enjoy some words. Oh, hey! We've wrangled another word enjoyer. It's Solace State, Motive's Iron Man, and Space Marine 2's Ashley Cooper! Cheers Ashley - mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

What are you currently reading?

I haven't been reading as much recently as I normally like to, but I've been working on fixing that. I finally started reading Harrow the Ninth while I was on vacation a couple weeks ago. It's the second book in Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb series. The pitch for the first book, Gideon the Ninth, is "lesbian necromancers in space" and it delivers on every word in that sentence. Gideon is one of my favourite books in recent memory, and so far Harrow feels different in an interesting way and I'm excited to see where it goes.