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.