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 12. – A book you wanted to read for a long time but still haven’t.

The film Hackers has always been one of my comfort watches, that perfect blend of neon‑soaked aesthetics, thumping soundtrack, chaotic charm, and, of course, Acid Burn being effortlessly iconic. It’s pure, unashamed entertainment, and it hits the spot every single time.

Because I adore the film, I’ve long been curious about the book it was based on. Everyone says it goes deeper into the story, and let’s be honest, books behind films are almost always richer, stranger, and better. So it’s been sitting on my “must read one day” list for ages, like a little digital gremlin reminding me of my own procrastination.

The problem? I could never actually find a copy. It became one of those mythical items: always talked about, never spotted in the wild.

Until now.

A copy finally landed in my hands, well, technically it arrived a week ago, but I’ve been deliberately holding off cracking it open so I could tie it neatly into today’s prompt. Now that the moment has arrived, I can dive in tomorrow with a clear conscience and a ridiculous amount of excitement.

Hack the Planet!

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 11. – Favourite classic book.

If I had to choose just one, I’d go with The Mabinogion, that remarkable collection of medieval Welsh prose tales that stands as one of the great surviving treasures of early Welsh literature. It isn’t a single authored novel but an anthology of eleven stories, gathered in the 12th–13th centuries and written in Middle Welsh, yet drawn from oral traditions far older than the manuscripts themselves.

What makes it so compelling is not just its age, though it predates the so‑called “classics” like Dickens by centuries, but its depth. These are stories that carry the weight of myth, morality, and memory. They teach lessons without preaching, weaving together magic, heroism, tragedy, and humour in a way only the old Celtic storytellers could manage.

It is, in every sense, Welsh to its bones: proud, strange, lyrical, and utterly itself. As classic books go, you’d be hard‑pressed to find one more deserving of the title.

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 10. – A book you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving.

These questions are turning out to be far trickier than expected, either because I’m hopelessly indecisive or because I read an absurd number of books every year and end up loving most of them. Probably both. But after some internal wrestling, I’m going to give the honour to Coming in Hot by Deany Ray, the first book in the Piper Harris series.

I originally picked it up for a very practical reason: reconnaissance on behalf of my mother. She also devours books at a frankly alarming rate, and I’m always on the lookout for new series to feed her habit. I’d seen an advert for this one, a biker girl and her biker grandmother, both former members of an outlaw motorcycle club, forced into Witness Protection and unceremoniously relocated to a retirement community in Florida. Naturally, once there, they can’t help but stumble into murder after murder while trying to keep a low profile. It sounded like the sort of chaos she’d enjoy.

What I didn’t expect was how funny the book would be. The characters were sharp, warm, and wonderfully eccentric, and the whole thing had a rhythm that made it impossible to put down. I picked it up “just to check,” and suddenly I was three books deep, then five, then the entire series was gone in a blur of caffeine and poor life choices.

Now I’m stuck waiting for the next instalment like a Victorian child waiting for the next chapter of Dickens to be delivered by horse. God darn it, Deany, write faster!

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 9. – Most Overrated book.

I should probably begin with a confession, no, a declaration. I have never read these books. I need that on record before anyone starts sharpening pitchforks or waving dog‑eared paperbacks at me. I have not read them. And yet here I am, naming what I believe to be the most overrated book in the world.

For me, the crown has to go to Fifty Shades of Grey. For those fortunate enough to have dodged the cultural tidal wave, it began life as a piece of fanfiction inspired by the Twilight series. You can still find the early posts floating around online, long before E. L. James turned it into a novel, an unedited one, at that.

Then, for reasons that still baffle me, the book went viral. Women’s reading groups devoured it. People who hadn’t picked up a novel in years suddenly had opinions. It became a moment in time, a phenomenon you couldn’t escape. Every few days someone would reference it, quote it, or sigh wistfully about “Mr Grey,” as though he were the new standard of romantic aspiration.

And yet… why? According to several people I trust, people who actually read the thing, it was riddled with errors, clunky prose, and in dire need of a firm editorial hand. The meme of the era summed it up neatly: if Mr Grey didn’t have money, he wouldn’t be a mysterious romantic figure; he’d be reported to the authorities.

Even the BDSM community, who you’d think might have welcomed the sudden mainstream interest, were furious. They argued that the book misrepresented their practices, their ethics, and their culture. By their standards, the so‑called “hero” would have been shown the door for behaviour that crossed the line into unhealthy and unsafe territory.

By any sensible measure, the story should have remained what it began as: a piece of fanfiction enjoyed by a niche audience. Instead, it spread across the world as a “must‑read,” a cultural juggernaut that somehow escaped the gravitational pull of quality control.

So yes, despite never having read it, Fifty Shades of Grey remains my pick for the most overrated book of all time. And I stand by that, unread and unrepentant.

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 8. – Most underrated book.

Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné might be the most influential fantasy novel that too many readers have never actually picked up. It introduced Elric, the frail, albino sorcerer‑king kept alive by drugs and bound to the soul‑eating sword Stormbringer, long before the genre embraced brooding, morally grey protagonists. He’s the original anti‑hero, paving the way for characters like Geralt of Rivia and every conflicted, reluctant hero who followed.

What makes Elric endure isn’t just the swordplay or the strangeness of Melniboné, but the philosophical weight beneath it. Moorcock uses Elric’s doomed journey to explore existential questions, the cosmic struggle between Law and Chaos, and the cost of heroism when every victory feels like a loss. It’s dark, tragic, and far more introspective than many of its contemporaries.

Despite this, the series is often overlooked by modern readers, perhaps because it’s leaner and stranger than today’s sprawling epics, or because its publication order can seem confusing from the outside. Yet its influence is enormous: the multiverse, the Eternal Champion, even the alignment system in role‑playing games all carry Moorcock’s fingerprints.

If you enjoy fantasy that challenges the usual tropes and gives you a protagonist who’s as haunting as he is heroic, Elric of Melniboné is a masterpiece hiding in plain sight.

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 7. – A guilty pleasure book.

Today’s prompt asks for a “guilty pleasure book,” and I immediately ran into a small problem: I don’t really have a single book that fits the bill. What I do have, however, is an entire guilty‑pleasure genre, and it all began with four wonderfully chaotic women on the internet.

Years ago, Felicia Day, Veronica Belmont, Bonnie Burton, and Kiala Kazebee launched the Vaginal Fantasy Book Club, a monthly celebration of “spicy” fantasy and romance novels, discussed with equal parts intelligence, humour, and wine. I joined from the very beginning. Can you blame me? Four sharp, funny women talking about books that ranged from delightfully ridiculous to surprisingly heartfelt… it was irresistible.

And, full disclosure, I’m a massive Felicia Day fan. That alone was enough to drag me into genres I’d never have wandered into on my own.

So I read along with the book club. Month after month. Some of the books were genuinely good. Some were… let’s say “educational.” And some were so gloriously over‑the‑top that they should have come with a health warning and a complimentary fainting couch.

But here’s the thing: I enjoyed them.

Not all of them, obviously, I’m not completely without standards, but enough that I realised these “fantasy romance” novels had become my version of a palate cleanser. They’re light, quick, and full of something I’m told is called emotions. They don’t demand deep analysis or a notebook full of lore. They’re simply fun. Silly, dramatic, occasionally unhinged fun.

And sometimes that’s exactly what you need between heavier reads. A break. A reset. A story where the stakes are high, the shirts are optional, and the dragons may or may not be flirting with someone.

So no, I don’t have a single guilty pleasure book. But I absolutely have a guilty pleasure genre, and it’s the one that Felicia Day and company cheerfully dragged me into all those years ago.

It turns out that even a lifelong fantasy reader sometimes needs a little… fantasy romance to keep things interesting..

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 6. – Book you’ve read the most number of times.

(A sequel to yesterday’s “comfort book” confession)

Yesterday’s prompt asked for my “comfort” book, and after a brief stare‑down with my bookshelves, the kind of contemplative moment normally reserved for monks and people choosing a takeaway, I admitted the truth: it’s The Lord of the Rings. I’ve been rereading it since I was about eleven or twelve, and at this point it’s less a book and more a long‑term relationship.

So when today’s prompt asked for the book I’ve read the most times… well, there’s no suspense left, is there? It’s the same one. Again. Still. Always.

But the interesting part isn’t the answer, it’s the why.

This answer/post seems a little bit like a cop out for me. I will admit I did not read the list of prompts before starting this 30Day Challenge, if I had then I would probably have shuffled a few of the posts about. Which would have prevented things like this happening, two identical posts after each other.

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 5. – Your “comfort” book.

This prompt is the toughest so far, which sounds impressive until you remember we’re only on day five. Still, credit where it’s due: it made me think.

I’ve been sitting here eyeing up my bookshelves, packed with titles that each carry their own memories and meanings. But which one counts as my “comfort” book? Which one is the old faithful?

Well, if frequency of reading is the deciding factor, then the winner is obvious: The Lord of the Rings.

I first read it when I was about eleven or twelve, and I’ve returned to it more times than I can sensibly admit. In fact, it might be the only book from my childhood that I still read today. If that doesn’t earn it comfort‑book status, nothing 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 4. – Book turned into a movie and completely desecrated.

This one is almost too easy. It has lived rent‑free in my head since the day the film slithered onto our screens, wearing Stephen King’s name like a stolen coat.

Stephen King’s The Lawnmower Man A delightfully deranged short story about a man who hires someone to mow his lawn… only to discover that the “lawnmower man” is a naked, grass‑eating, animal‑devouring servant of an ancient god. He scuttles around on all fours, munches his way through the garden (and anything unfortunate enough to be in it), and eventually turns on the homeowner. You know, classic, unhinged Stephen King weirdness. A bit grotesque, a bit mythic, and absolutely nothing to do with computers, technology, or anything invented after 1975.

The Movie Version Then Hollywood came along and said, “What if we took this story… and didn’t use any of it?” Instead, we got a film about virtual reality, brain enhancement experiments, and a vulnerable gardener who becomes super‑intelligent before ascending into cyberspace like some pixelated demigod. It’s all wires, VR headsets, and early‑90s CGI that looks like someone fed a ZX Spectrum too much sugar.

The only thing the film has in common with the original story is the title, and even that feels like a stretch.

The Aftermath Stephen King was so appalled by the liberties taken (and by “liberties” I mean “complete abandonment of the source material”) that he took the producers to court to have his name removed from the film entirely. And he won. Which tells you everything you need to know.

It remains, to this day, one of the most spectacular examples of Hollywood taking a perfectly good story and booting it into the sun.