2023 has not been a year of prolific reading. However, I got book tokens for my birthday.

If you didn’t know a book token is an amazing gift, it involves guilt free book buying and a chance to spend a happy hour (or three) in a bookshop. It’s a perfect gift.

So I bought some books…

I have loved all of the Naomi Novik books I have read and I also enjoy that they are very different I bought and devoured all three of the Scholomance Trilogy (A Deadly Education, The Last Graduate, The Golden Enclaves).

It’s a magic boarding school, and it’s not in anyway lovely or cosy. Despite that, it’s about family and friendship and choices and how easy it is to live with bad things because everyone else is. And it’s funny, I was so taken with this at the beginning of the second book

Most of the religious or spiritual people I know – and to be fair, they’re mostly the sort of people who land in a vaguely pagan commune in Wales, or else they’re terrified wizard kids crammed into a school that’s trying to kill them – regularly beseech a benevolent and loving all-wise deity to provide them with useful advice through the medium of miraculous signs and portents. Speaking as my mother’s daughter, I can say with authority that they wouldn’t like it if they got it.

The Last Gradute – Naomi Novik

Aside from the part about communes and wizard school, it’s very true.

I really struggle to articulate why I like the books I like, it’s why I suck at English Lit. Anyway, I really enjoyed them and they are worth reading.