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.