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.