Sleeping Naked is Green, by Vanessa Farquharson

Is it just me, or is there a huge publishing trend lately relating to a particular type of memoir? I know memoirs are hot anyway, and I’m reading lots more of them than I used to, but I’m thinking of something different from the traditional “I’ve lived an interesting life and now I’m writing about [...]

Solitude, by Robert Kull

Bob Kull spent a year living entirely alone on a remote island off the coast of South America.  As someone who had spent extended periods of time in wilderness solitude before, Kull was interested in exploring the mental, physical, emotional and spiritual effects of spending a full year in complete wilderness solitude.
One of the first [...]

The Year of Fog, by Michelle Richmond

It wouldn’t be accurate to say I read this book so much as I devoured it.  Or maybe it devoured me — swallowed me whole, chewed me up and spit me out.  It is, as you may have heard (several people recommended it to me) a very good book, but reading it was, for me, [...]

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, by Jamie Ford

And now we come to volume 3 in the Unintentional World War Two trilogy — the third of three books I read in a row all dealing with aspects of the second world war that I knew little about.  Mind you, I knew more about the internment of Japanese immigrants and their descendants in both [...]

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

This is the second in my “unintentional trilogy” of World War Two novels — books I stumbled across, one after another, each of which revealed an aspect or a story from that war that I didn’t know much about.  In fact I knew nothing about the historical event at the centre of The Guernsey Literary [...]

Changing Light, by Nora Gallagher

I’ve enjoyed Nora Gallagher’s memoirs — Things Seen and Unseen and Practicing Resurrection — so much that I was almost hesitant about picking up her debut novel. There are some writers — Anne Lamott is the one who springs first to mind — who are such brilliant nonfiction writers that their novels, while still good, [...]

Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven, by Susan Jane Gilman

This is one of the best books I’ve read so far this year. I found it entertaining, engaging, engrossing, and generally excellent (I guess it’s a 4-E book!).
One of my few regrets in life is that I didn’t spend more time travelling when I was young and relatively free of responsibilities.  The two weeks my [...]

An Altar in the World, by Barbara Brown Taylor

This was an absolutely, thoroughly enjoyable book — both stimulating and satisfying.  An Altar in the World is a meditation on making spiritual practices out of everyday life — things like being present in the natural world, doing manual labour, being with other people, or taking a Sabbath rest from our everyday routines.  It is [...]

At His Command, by Brenda Coulter

OK, so, it’s a romance novel. And yes, it’s an inspirational romance novel. For a lot of readers, those two things will throw up barriers before they even pick up the book. For me, the deciding factor was that it’s an inspirational romance written by Brenda Coulter, who writes (though not nearly enough, lately) the [...]