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..