Recommendations

The Scholomance series - Naomi Novik

Definitely one of my most favourite things. It's a trilogy about class divides (at least, that's the theme that pops out the most to me), and it also has a really interesting and dynamic magic system, very fleshed-out and engaging characters and a magical school that accurately captures the horror of real school. And the joy of finally getting to leave.

The His Dark Materials series - Philip Pullman

Set, at least partially, in an alternate universe in which people are metaphysically bound to shapeshifting animal-like spirits called dæmons, and also the Catholic Church has pretty much taken over Europe (it's all John Calvin's fault). Includes multiple heart-wrenching betrayals, several dramatic journeys, incredible feats of deception, and a great protagonist (and many other great characters). The first book is called The Golden Compass in the USA and Northern Lights elsewhere.

Homestuck - Andrew Hussie

No, really. It's actually kinda good. It's also very long, though, at a little over 8000 pages. There's a lot of timey-wimey stuff, genre subversion, subversion of that genre subversion. So many different things happen in it that 90% of all tumblr posts could be accurately tagged #homestuck. Well, maybe not that many, but there is a long-running joke of people tagging a post #homestuck and OP going "What even happens in Homestuck???" In fact, nearly anything I could say about it would be a spoiler.

Kill Six Billion Demons - Abbadon AKA Tom Parkinson-Morgan

This webcomic is so great that I've bought the first two volumes in print. It is still updating as of 21 September 2026, in its sixth (I think?) volume, and updates every Friday or Saturday depending on your time zone. It has incredibly detailed and varied character design, and an awesome cosmology that I believe is inspired in part by Hinduism. The main theme, in my opinion, is power, but it also explores things like identity, revenge, family, all that good stuff. Insert stupid ogre meme.

Eat God - David J Prokopetz (early access)

A game that doesn't take itself too seriously, and yet the rules have clearly had a ton of work and thought put into them. Despite the fact that this game is (as of 21 September 2026) a self-described work in progress, it is incredibly fun, and also significantly simpler than, for example, D&D 5th Edition. (Not that that's an achievement.) Basically, you play as a God-Eater, a "gender-ambiguous muppety thing" running around and causing havoc.

Piano - Bartolomeo Cristofori

At least, according to Wikipedia, that's who invented the piano. And who am I to deny it? I've been playing this one for a while. In a very broad sense, since I was three. And I gotta say: it's actually kinda good. You can play up to 10 notes at once, or more if you use your whole arm, though that's considered somewhat crude. The key mechanism seems kinda overengineered, but once you actually understand it it's really quite elegant. And the range! The range is incredible. More than practically any other common musical instrument. At least on one with the standard 88 keys. Also, the repertoire is great, because everyone loves making piano arrangements for music that wasn't originally written for piano. Also you can play pieces written for harpsichord on the piano, because they are basically the same instrument. You can even play organ pieces on the piano if you just pretend the lowest notes don't exist. And that's not even getting into the pieces originally written for piano. Suite bergamasque, my beloved...

Flute - Theobald Boehm

Not to be confused with various other instruments also called flutes. I haven't played any of those others, so I can't comment on them. But the Boehm flute is pretty good. Unfortunately it can only play one note at a time. Well. That's not quite accurate. There are these things called poly... polyphonics? I think??? Or maybe polytonics??? But they're an advanced technique and pretty difficult. This instrument's range is pretty mediocre. It can go quite high, almost as high as a standard 88-key piano, but the bottom end of its range is Middle C, or the B just below that if you get a longer foot joint with an extra pad (a "B-foot").

Classical guitar - Antiono de Torres Jurado

Some will say you need to pluck this instrument's strings with your fingernails. And they're probably right. But that hasn't stopped me "playing with flesh", as they delightfully put it. I started teaching myself this one in late August 2026, and I've been thoroughly enjoying myself. My one gripe is that it does leave the left-hand fingertips somewhat sensitive.

General Australian English | General Australian English

Pretty alright, I must say. It is a little irritating how people will insist on puppeting the deceased and rotting corpse of the subjunctive and pretending it's still alive, but they do that in Italian too, so whatever. Do-support is incredible (and no doubt incredibly frustrating for adult learners). It has 19 or 20 vowels, depending on whether you count short /æ/ (as in bat) and long /æː/ (as in bad) as separate phonemes. But there are no minimal pairs, so I think they are the same phoneme. Linking /r/ is apparently a source of frustration for speakers of rhotic dialects trying to understand what we're saying, which is hilarious to me.

Italian | Italiano

Italian has an interesting history. But this isn't about that. Italian has a pretty standard Indo-European verbal system, mostly directly inherited from Latin with only a few changes. It claims to have a perfectly phonetic writing system, which is only a little bit untrue. The letter h is always silent; and the phoneme pairs /e ɛ/ and /o ɔ/ are not distinguished in writing except in certain very short words. Also, the definite articles are a mess. There are seven of them, depending on gender, number, and the initial sound of the following word, and a lot of syncretism between the different forms. Oh, yes, that reminds me. Gender. I am aware that grammatical gender and social gender are different things. The thing that specifically annoys me about the Indo-European gender system is that the grammatical gender of names and personal pronouns is equivalent to the social gender of their referent. So io "I" is grammatically feminine if the speaker is female, and grammatically masculine if the speaker is male. Obviously this ended up being a problem for me because I don't exactly fit into either of those categories.

Old English | Ænglisċ

I never really got around to learning this language properly. But I did manage to memorise the first thirteen lines of Bēowulf. The vowel system is, thankfully, much more reasonable than that of any modern English dialect. Its distinctive /e͜o/ diphthong was an interesting one to learn to pronounce. The verbal ablaut presented somewhat of a challenge, but ultimately I think it would have been made easier by the fact that traces of it remain in modern English (sing vs sang vs sung), a language I speak natively. I may return to Ænglisċ at some point.

Classical Arabic | al-ʕarabiyyat | العربية

Naturally, learning the script for this one was a big challenge. Technically, it is related to the Latin script, but it's so distantly related that it might as well not be. The verbal morphology is also very strange from an Indo-European perspective. But you probably already knew that, or else you don't care and probably aren't reading this. Here's something you probably didn't know: Arabic has irregular prepositions, which is pretty impressive because in most languages prepositions don't even have an inflectional paradigm! But in Arabic, prepositions join with personal pronouns that follow them. Possibly they would be better analysed as cases. But what do I know? I'm not a linguist.

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