Symptoms of high-functioning anxiety.

Having read Northern Lights a few months ago, I thought it was best to pick up the sequel before I forgot too much about it! I’m also unsure if the new TV series covers just the first book or the full trilogy!
The first book was set in one universe, this one moves into 3, and what I found really helpful, was that in the margin of each page was a little icon that related to the universe you were currently in, so if you picked up the book you could remember where you were – or sometimes even mid-reading!
There was one point around a third to halfway through where I very nearly gave up – I’d read the same page so many times over several days and just couldn’t get into it to get past it, but I’m glad I carried on. That bit was in what felt like a bit of a side plot that at that point I just didn’t care about yet, but it was needed for later on.
This book left off on what felt like an even bigger cliffhanger than the first one, and I’ve had a lot of people advise me when I was struggling to carry on with this book, that this is one you just had to get through to get to the third which sounds like it might be deemed the best of the three, so I’m looking forward to picking up the next one! Might just find something else to read first to help divide the books in my head so they don’t all merge into one 🙂

Tom Cruise is turning into Sandi Toksvig.
Circle of Life as a circle of fifths.
Teachers out to get their students.
Stupid things people have done.


My brother and his girlfriend live in Denmark, and got me this beautiful edition of these fairy tales for my birthday this year. (They do a few other books in this range if you’re interested). It contains illustrations but also things that fold out or move to make it more interactive.
It contains twelve of his stories, some of which I knew, some I thought I knew, some I knew the title, and some I knew nothing about at all:
Some of them turned out to be more violent, gruesome or heavy than the maybe filtered versions we know – there is very little of The Little Mermaid in the Disney film of the same name. She’s not called Ariel, she has her tongue cut out, she goes to kill the prince with a knife in his sleep, all sorts of chaos!
It’s a really beautiful book and really interesting to read the original versions of the stories.
