The idea is delightfully simple: for 30 days, you post once a day in response to a book-themed question. That’s it. No essays, no footnotes, no need to summon the ghost of Shakespeare, just honest answers, curious reflections, and maybe a few cheeky confessions about your reading habits. I have decided to take part this year, and since I picked a month with 31 days (I know it would have made more sense to use a 30 day one) I am using March 1st to explain what I am doing.

Each day brings a new prompt: favourite characters, memorable endings, guilty pleasures, and the books that made you weep, rage, or fall in love with the written word. It’s a gentle nudge to celebrate your literary life, one post at a time.

So why not give it a go? Dust off your bookshelf, sharpen your wit, and join the challenge. Thirty days. Thirty questions. One slightly eccentric bookworm’s journey through the pages.

DAY 26. – Book that makes you laugh out loud.

I am going back a bit with this one, all the way to 1973, but I am choosing Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers by Harry Harrison. It is gloriously ridiculous in all the right ways.

The story begins with two college students, Chuck van Chider and his loyal partner in chaos Jerry Courtenay, who accidentally invent a device capable of hurling them across the cosmos. The engine of this marvel is a substance called Cheddite, created by irradiating cheddar cheese. Yes, cheese becomes both fuel and super weapon, and the book never once apologises for it.

Chuck, Jerry, their shared love interest Sally Goodfellow, and their janitor who turns out to be a KGB spy named Old John are promptly flung to Titan, one of Saturn’s moons. There they encounter the Titanians, who are every bit as strange as you would hope. Before long, through a chain of events so bizarre it feels like the author was daring himself to go further, the group is launched into the far reaches of the galaxy and straight into an interstellar war.

The villains of this cosmic conflict are tiny telepathic turtles that people keep in the handles of their guns. Not because they want to, but because the turtles make them. Space turtles with mind control. Of course they do. At this point you simply surrender to the madness and enjoy the ride.

The whole book is comedy gold. It is a loving parody of classic space opera, written with a wink, a grin, and a complete disregard for restraint. If you want a story that makes you laugh out loud and reminds you that science fiction can be both clever and utterly daft, this is the one.