Read more, read widely in 2026!

It’s that time of the year again — presenting an all-new edition of the Book Bingo reading challenge! This reader favorite is back for a seventh consecutive year, and I couldn’t be more thrilled to be part of your reading journey once again!

Read on for all the details.

All you can do with regard to your own life is choose the best path that you believe in. On the other hand, what kind of judgement do people pass on that choice? That is the task of other people, and is not a matter you can do anything about.

Billed as a Japanese phenomenon, The Courage to Be Disliked is written as a dialogue between a youth and a philosopher. If you were expecting Japanese philosophy, this books isn’t it. Rather, it revolves around Alfred Adler’s psychology, blended with wisdom from ancient Greek philosophers like Socrates and Plato.

Now that we’ve got that bit cleared out, let’s come to this book.

It’s eye-opening, controversial in parts, and quite a bit for this Jungian enthusiast to wrap her head around!

Cozy witch books have an irresistible charm, don’t they? They bring to mind spells and covens, small town witches and secret family potions, old grimoires and ancient magic. But the witchy reads I love most aren’t just soft and comforting, they have an edge…a bite. They’re the kind of autumn witch books that feel like soft woolen sweaters and pumpkin spice lattes, with a shimmer of danger and a bite of feminist fire.

If you’re looking for witchy novels with a gothic atmosphere that balance comfort with thrills, here are eight spellbinding choices to slip into this season.

From the back cover: A village is haunted by an insidious spirit tiger. A bee sting reminds a Nocte boy of his brother’s beheading and transforms him into a deadly headhunter. A Donyi-Polo priest must continue practising his animistic rituals to preserve the fading vestiges of his indigenous religion. The curse of a high priest follows the thief who stole the forbidden sacred ornaments…These stories offer an alluring escape to the land of the dawn-lit mountains, Arunachal Pradesh, bringing us face to face with the real and the magical.

Arunachal Pradesh, a land of mystique and mysticism, India’s remotest state and the first on Indian soil to greet the rising sun. Perhaps that’s how it got its moniker as the land of the dawn-lit-mountains.

Manhattan, 1870. Rua’s first memory is of being trapped in an underground cave. She can’t remember anything else about who she is or where she came from. So when the wealthy Harrington family mistakes her for their missing daughter, Emma, she goes along with the charade, hoping to find answers about who she really is. As Rua struggles to find her footing with the Harrington matriarch and blunders her way through America’s elite society, she finds herself inexplicably drawn to Finn, the Lord of Donore, a newcomer to Manhattan society.

2024 has been a wonderful reading year. I’ve read somewhat fewer books than the last couple of years, but there have been some absolute gems in the mix.

From dystopia to historical fiction, fantasy, romance and magical realism, you’re bound to find something that tickles your fancy in this list of my 5 favourite books from 2024

“She returned with the boy ten days before the rains. The boy was hardly to blame but still, first came the stranger and then came the rains.”

Thus starts Lorraine Wilson’s We Are All Ghosts In The Forest, a post-apocalyptic novel set in a small village somewhere in Eastern Europe, in an unspecified amount of time after the Crash, when the internet escaped its bounds in a paroxysm of entropy.

The world is now inhabited by digital ghosts. Fragments of the internet that roam the world, playing their stories in a loop. If you aren’t careful, they can infect you, though like any virus, some ghosts are more infectious than others. Weak ones are harmless, or ones with little emotion in them. Data, maps, news reports, shopping websites, things like that. The occasional story ghost can be a problem if you happen to know the story. But the ones connected to destructive emotions are the riskiest, if your state of mind resonates with them well enough, they can… upload themselves into you.