I’ve spent the last few months following the recommendations from these and (for the most part) loving them, so thought I’d contribute back:
The Girl With All The Gifts, one of the few things I’ve read las month NOT recommended here, is a fresh, heartwrenching, intelligent and often rational take on the zombie apocalypse genre (not one I am normally fond of, either!)
Thief’s Magic reads almost like a Lawrence Watt-Evans book; it is unfortunately the first in a trilogy and makes no pretence otherwise, so you get more of an introduction than a complete story, but nevertheless a fantasy well worth starting.
As someone working on AAA games, generally what happens is the engine is written in C++ (and small performance-critical sections possibly hand-coded using intrinsics or assembly) and some portion of the game logic is written in a scripting language. Lua is quite popular.