Our Office Secret Santa – Books Only!

An unexpected flurry of excellent book recommendations!

This year, my colleague Luise had the idea that since we’re all book nerds we should do a ‘books only’ Secret Santa this year.

The rules were as follows:

  • We all write down our name on a piece of paper
  • We add a couple of books we’ve enjoyed, authors we like, and a genre we’d be willing to try
  • We chuck them all into a box, give it a good shake and then pick out somebody to buy for!

The results

Everyone was pretty happy with their books – and we only had a couple of repeat purchases. Here are a few of the results…

For Alice, who loves sci-fi and fantasy: ‘A Discovery of Witches’ by Deborah Harkness

For Terryn, whose Secret Santa was determined to give this book to whoever she got: ‘The Nightingale’ by Kristin Hannah

For Ciara, who likes a good drama: Initially ‘The Kite Runner’ by Khaled Hosseini – but as she’d read it, rapidly replaced with ‘Conversations with Friends’ by Sally Rooney

For Marissa, who likes mysteries: ‘The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle’ by Stuart Turton

For Alex, who likes sci-fi: Alex was my person! So I got him ‘Too Like the Lightning’ by Ada Palmer – it’s the first in a trilogy of sci-fi novels set in the future where humanity has done away with religions and governments and now exists in ‘hives’. However the balance looks to be upset by the appearance of a miracle working child…

Hopefully he likes it!

For me, who wanted to try a bit of fantasy: Alice got me a book called ‘Red Rising’ by Pierce Brown. I hadn’t heard of it before, but the cover quote was certainly promising:

“Ender, Katniss and now Darrow” – Scott Sigler

‘It’s like The Hunger Games?!’ I shrieked.

It was indeed like The Hunger Games (I’ve just finished it) – but there’ll be a full review coming later.

Suffice to say it was great and now my sister is charging her way through it.

Anyways – a bookish Secret Santa is a great idea for any office, so try it next year and let me know how it goes 🙂

Happy Christmas everyone!

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