Subscription box: Illumicrate
Theme/Month: Stories Within Stories, December 2025
Ownership: Subscribed on their 6 boxes option. If you are interested in purchasing an Illumicrate subscription, you can do it on their website.
Illumicrate is a book subscription box that usually features fantasy and sci-fi, and curates a wide range of books, including both young adult and adult fiction. It usually contains a new release and several bookish goodies.
Last box for 2025, an inception of stories as theme, which I think a lot of the books for this year had something like that, smaller stories or tales in them as part of the story.
Let's go over the contents, starting from the left and going towards the right:
A bookmark album, which I think works if you collect bookmarks to keep, I have been trying to live a “use the good china” life (slowly) and so most of ht time I use the bookmark I have at hand even if it is a fancy one. But the idea is cool
Stickers, which are adorable and all about various books.
Metal bookmark, funnily enough I think these are the ones I use the least purely because they are heavier and noisier to move around, but so pretty!
The featured book was The Bookshop Below, by Georgia Summers, and I will admit I have not read it yet but I’d like to. I haven’t been reading as much as I’d like, in part due to a lot of books I want to read being hardcover, therefore not easy to carry around nor to read in a cramped train or tube (which is when I do most of my reading).
And finally a reading journal, I normally gift these to friends since I don’t do a reading journal, but I appreciate them because they are utterly stunning always and great gifts to pass on to friends who do love to journal about what they read.
I am not sure this suited much the Stories within stories theme. I am not getting a feel for having storiception, but more of a reminiscence what has been and the stories lived or read. It was an interesting end of the year being subtle but trying to end it on a memory type of idea, which I like I just don't think theme vs what it actually had are the same thing (I do think stories within stories would be hard to do, a jigsaw here would've done quite well with either scenes from the books of the year and then interlace them and entwine them). But still a nice box to wrap up 2025.
