Blog Posts:

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 21. – Book you tell people you’ve read, but haven’t (or haven’t actually finished).

Today is an absolute copout, and I am owning it. There is no book that I claim to have read when I have not. There is no secret shelf of shame where unfinished novels gather dust while I pretend to be well read and sophisticated. If I fail to finish a book, I will cheerfully admit it to anyone who asks. In fact, earlier in this challenge I confessed that I abandoned one of the Wheel of Time books and have been pretending to read it for years. It sits there, judging me, while I remain convinced that it is just painfully dull.

If there is ever a book I feel I ought to read in order to fit in with a group, then I will simply read it. I have endured some truly dreadful books in my time. I have also been part of book clubs with tastes that can only be described as questionable. The Vaginal Fantasy Book Club springs to mind, as does Sunday Beer, which was less a book club and more a social experiment in how far enthusiasm can carry you through bad literature.

I also work in IT and I am a man, which means I proudly uphold the ancient tradition of never reading instructions or manuals. If something breaks, I will figure it out through trial, error, and mild swearing, not through documentation.

So no, there is no book I pretend to have read. If I have not read it, I will say so. If I have abandoned it, I will say that too. And if it was terrible, I will absolutely tell you all about it.

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 20. – Favourite childhood book.

My favourite book as a child was The Hobbit, but I have already used The Lord of the Rings as an answer for a previous day, and those books are not really considered children’s books in the traditional sense. So for this one I will choose something that sits more firmly in the realm of childhood reading.

I will go with The Hardy Boys. Yes, it is a whole series rather than a single book, but I devoured those stories when I was young. They sat proudly on the same shelf as The Three Investigators, and together they formed the backbone of my early reading adventures. Those books were absolutely written for children, and I adored them. They were my first real doorway into the world of mystery, where every chapter held a clue and every clue whispered a promise.

I have always loved a good puzzle. Even as a child I would sit there trying to work out who the culprit was long before the grand reveal. I would study the characters, weigh up the motives, and convince myself that I had cracked the case. Sometimes I was right, sometimes I was spectacularly wrong, but the thrill of the chase was always the same. Looking back, I suppose I have always had an inquiring mind, the sort that refuses to leave a question alone until it has been poked, prodded, and unravelled.

Those books did more than entertain me. They shaped the way I think, the way I observe, and the way I approach a mystery even now. They were my first companions in the art of curiosity, and I still hold them fondly in the library of my memory.

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 19. – A favourite author.

I have already mentioned several of my favourite authors in earlier posts, so for today I will choose someone different.

I will go with James Herbert. I have adored his work ever since I first read The Rats many years ago, after a conversation with my father. He had read the book in his youth and it genuinely unsettled him, because at the time his own neighbourhood was being overrun by unusually large rats. When a horror novel lines up a little too neatly with real life, it leaves a mark, and that story certainly left one on him. His enthusiasm passed straight on to me, and I have been a fan ever since.

For an honourable mention, I feel I should put forward myself. I am an author after all, and I happen to be very fond of me. In fact, I am one of my favourite people in existence. If you cannot champion yourself with a smile, who will.

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 18. – A book you wish you could live in.

A friend of mine recently reminded me of a series that several of us in the office once devoured for reasons that will be immediately obvious. The Wiz Biz by Rick Cook.

The premise is delightfully simple. An ordinary systems administrator from our world is suddenly summoned into a classic fantasy realm where desperate wizards are attempting to call forth a mighty hero to save them. Instead of a sword swinging champion, they end up with a slightly bewildered but very capable Linux sysadmin.

This turns out to be exactly what they needed. The hero, known as Wiz, approaches magic the same way he approaches code. He studies it, breaks it apart, rewrites it, and eventually begins to build his own compilers and languages. By treating spells as programs and magic as a system that can be debugged, optimised, and extended, he creates forms of power that no one in that world has ever imagined. In true programmer fashion, he becomes the hero not through destiny or prophecy, but through logic, curiosity, and a willingness to tinker.

There is something wonderfully appealing about the idea of stepping into a world where magic behaves like software, where a few lines of carefully written code can reshape reality, and where the limits are set only by imagination and the occasional segmentation fault of the arcane.

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 17. – Author I wish people would read more.

I am simply going to choose one of my favourite authors, the incomparable Dennis Yates Wheatley.

Dennis Yates Wheatley was an English writer whose astonishing output of thrillers and occult adventures made him one of the best selling authors in the world from the nineteen thirties through to the nineteen sixties. His work enjoyed a few revivals in the seventies and eighties when publishers released collections of his Black Magic novels, helped along by a couple of Hammer Horror adaptations that brought his darker tales back into the public imagination.

Yet he was far more than the occult chap people remember. He produced an enormous body of work, both fiction and nonfiction, and long before Ian Fleming ever created James Bond, Wheatley had already written a series featuring a suave, worldly, and rather dangerous gentleman adventurer who would not have looked out of place in a tuxedo with a martini.

He also lived a life as colourful as his characters. During the war he served as the only civilian member of Churchills war council, brought in specifically to imagine the unthinkable and devise ideas that were as bold as they were bizarre. His job was to think in ways that others could not, and that sense of daring invention runs through everything he wrote.

Wheatley has always appealed to me because he blended adventure, mystery, and the occult with a certain old world charm, and he did it with complete confidence. It is no wonder he became one of my enduring favourites.

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 16. – Most thought-provoking book.

I am going to have to choose The Unlocked Secret: Freemasonry Examined by James Dewar. It first appeared in 1966 and has been reprinted a few times since, but my copy came to me in the most ordinary and magical way.

I found it on a family camping holiday in South Wales when I was about twelve. We had been walking along the sea front and were cutting back to the car through Woolworths. By the checkouts they kept great bins of old remaindered books, each one marked with a small notch to show it was unwanted stock, and all of them going for ten pence. I was already a keen reader, and my parents told me I could pick something to keep me occupied for the rest of the holiday. A quick rummage in the bin produced this strange little volume, and so twelve year old me ended up reading my first work of non fiction, an exposé of Freemasonry and its secrets.

I had never even heard of the Masons at that age. Young Wayne was a sweet and innocent creature, blissfully unaware that many years later he would join the Craft himself and still own that same battered book. Yet it stayed with me. It was a curious and unsettling read for a child, full of talk about secret societies and mysterious rituals, and it opened a door in my imagination that has never quite closed.

I trace my lifelong fascination with the esoteric back to that moment, standing in Woolworths with sand still in my shoes, choosing a book that would shape my interests for decades to come.

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 15. – A character who you can relate to the most.

If I had to choose the literary character I relate to most, it would almost certainly be Sherlock Holmes. My relentless pattern‑spotting, my inability to leave a puzzle unsolved, and my quiet suspicion that most people are playing life on “easy mode” all push me firmly into Holmes territory. Not the deerstalker‑hat, pipe‑smoke, Victorian‑fog Holmes, but the sharper, modern incarnation—the one who proudly calls himself a “high‑functioning sociopath” while simultaneously revealing more heart than he’d ever admit. Now, I’m not claiming to be Holmes. I don’t keep severed ears in the fridge (not after the incident in ’06), and I’ve yet to be chased across Wrexham by a criminal mastermind. Or have I? (What happens in the King’s stays in the King’s).

Holmes has that infuriating habit of noticing everything, dust on a shoe, a frayed cuff, the faint ghost of yesterday’s cigar. I relate perhaps a little too strongly. My mind, like his, insists on running at full tilt even when the situation absolutely does not require it. Someone tells a simple story, and I’m already reconstructing the unseen context, motivations, and likely future consequences. It’s not showing off; it’s just how the wiring works. A blessing when writing, lecturing, or unravelling symbolism… and a curse when I’m simply trying to enjoy a quiet pint.

Holmes notices what others miss. I notice what others avoid. A shift in tone. A hesitation. A symbol tucked into the corner of a painting. A ritual gesture someone didn’t realise they made. I’m not looking for these things, they simply arrive, uninvited, like over‑eager guests at a feast. Brilliant for storytelling, ceremony, and creative work. Less brilliant when someone says, “Don’t overthink it,” and I’ve already overthought it six layers deep.

Holmes famously keeps humanity at arm’s length, not out of cruelty, but because he finds the average person’s behaviour predictable, repetitive, and, dare I say it, boring. I wouldn’t go quite that far. I like people. I write for them, teach them, celebrate them. But I do understand Holmes’ quiet disdain for the mundane. Small talk feels like being forced to read the footnotes of a book I didn’t choose. Routine social scripts make me itch. And when someone proudly declares themselves “just normal,” I have to resist the urge to ask, “Why?” Normality is perfectly fine for others. For me, it’s like being handed a beige cardigan and told to enjoy the thrill.

Holmes spirals when he’s bored. He needs puzzles, mysteries, intellectual friction. I understand that intimately. Give me a creative challenge, a symbolic riddle, a myth to reinterpret, a ceremony to craft, my mind lights up like a forge. Leave me without stimulation, and I start mentally rearranging the universe just to keep myself entertained. This is why I write. Why I teach. Why I dive into mythic structures and Masonic symbolism. Why I can’t leave a half‑formed idea alone. Boredom is the enemy; curiosity is the cure.

So yes, of all the characters in literature, I’ve always related most to Mr Holmes.

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 14. – Favourite book turned into a movie.

Yesterday, I answered that the book I’ve wanted to read the longest, but still haven’t, is Hackers. And yes, that’s entirely because I adored the gloriously chaotic 1995 movie. Neon, nonsense, and rollerblades, what’s not to love?

But here’s the rub: I haven’t actually read the book yet. So I feel like I can’t quite count it as my “favourite book turned into a movie”, not until I’ve cracked the spine and seen how the pages compare to the pixels.

So instead, I’ll go with the one that’s been with me since I was knee-high to a hobbit: The Lord of the Rings. Yes, I know it’s technically a trilogy (or a single epic in three bindings, depending on your level of Tolkienian pedantry), but it’s been a beloved companion since I was in single digits. I grew up wandering Middle-earth in my imagination long before Peter Jackson brought it to life on screen.

And what a job he did. The films are a triumph, sweeping, stirring, and surprisingly faithful to the spirit of the books. Even his Hobbit trilogy, for all its extra padding and cinematic stretching, still managed to charm me. I didn’t mind the added flourishes; they felt like a bard riffing on a familiar tune.

So there you have it. My favourite book turned into a movie, with a side note that Hackers is still waiting in the wings, neon jacket and all.

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 13. – A book that disappointed you.

Easiest prompt so far: The Path of Daggers by Robert Jordan.

I first picked up The Wheel of Time on the recommendation of a friend, gods, it must be more than a decade ago now. I tore through the early books, absolutely devouring them. The world‑building, the momentum, the sense that everything was building toward something huge… I was all in.

And then I hit book eight.

The Path of Daggers was like slamming face‑first into narrative treacle. Slow, dense, and somehow packed with pages where absolutely nothing happened. It felt less like reading a novel and more like being handed a census report: endless lists of who was where, doing what (spoiler: nothing of consequence), and why I should apparently care. I made it about 30% of the way through before my brain staged a rebellion. I put it down “just for a bit” to read something else and reset.

That “bit” turned into years.

In fact, I checked Goodreads, it’s been fourteen years since I abandoned that book with the solemn promise that I’d return to it when I felt ready. Reader, I have not felt ready.

And that’s why The Path of Daggers remains the single most disappointing book I’ve ever encountered: not because it was bad in some dramatic, fiery way, but because it single‑handedly derailed an entire series I had been genuinely loving.

Do I think I’ll ever give it another go, or has it earned permanent exile on the Shelf of Eternal Avoidance?

I do not know.