I think some of the best gifts I’ve received have been books.

Not because I always understood what made a book special when I first picked it up. Sometimes I just liked the cover. Sometimes someone recommended it. Sometimes I was simply bored and needed something to read.

But somewhere along the way, novels became a very big part of my life.

I’ve spent so many evenings curled up with a book, telling myself I’ll read just one more chapter and then looking at the clock much later than I should have.

I loved getting lost in other people's stories.

I would think about characters long after I had finished a book. I would imagine what happened to them after the last page. Sometimes I’d even miss them a little.

And slowly, I started noticing something else.

I started paying attention to the writing.

Why did that particular sentence stay in my head? Why did one character feel so real? How did the writer make an ordinary moment feel important?

I wasn't reading novels thinking, This is going to make me a writer.

I was just reading.

But I think that's where it started.

The more I read, the more I wanted to write. At first, it was random thoughts, little paragraphs and ideas that would probably never make it past my notebook. Then came characters, stories and the occasional plot that I convinced myself was brilliant at 2 a.m.

Some of them were terrible.

A few were actually good.

And eventually, I stopped saying, “I like writing” and started saying, “I want to write.”

That's a big difference.

I think novels gave me something I didn't know I needed. They gave me a love for stories and the curiosity to understand how they are built.

They also taught me that there isn't just one way to tell a story.

Every writer sees the world a little differently.

And perhaps that is why I still think a novel is such a lovely gift.

You aren't just giving someone something to read.

You might be giving them a new favourite character, a new way of looking at something, a few hours of escape or even an idea they carry for years.

For me, books gave me all of that.

And somewhere between being a reader and getting lost in hundreds of stories, they gave me something else too.

The courage to believe that maybe, one day, I could write one of my own.