This is one of Michael Pollan’s earliest books, written more than thirty years ago. By his own account, he’s always been a keen gardener, and though this is the only book that he’s written about gardening, it is (as tends to be the case with most of his writing) one of the best books about gardening you could possibly read...

This is a memoir that recounts the ten years that the author spent as a museum guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It's a book about the museum and all the wonderful treasures that it holds, while also being a reflection on the importance of sometimes slowing down and taking a beat to look around us....

This is a book about books, and about the best there is of this genre. It's a collection of letters written over a period of twenty years...a correspondence between a reader and a bookseller. The reader is Helene Hanff, a freelance writer living in New York City, and the bookseller is Frank Doel, who worked for Marks & Co, a second-hand bookshop located at 84 Charing Cross Road, London...

This book, as it says in the title, is a diary, a day-to-day record of one year in a bookshop written by the owner Shaun Bythell who runs a second-hand bookshop in Wigtown which is Scotland’s book town. His shop is called, very simply, The Bookshop...

David Sedaris is one of my favourite writers. He has the rare ability to write comedy and pathos with equal skill. His writing is autobiographical and deeply personal. He writes about his family, his complicated and somewhat difficult relationship with his father, his middle-class upbringing in the American South, growing up gay in the seventies, his partner, Hugh and their life together, the years he spent living as an expat in France and England, and more...

This is a memoir, a meditation on life for a single person in a couple-dominated world, the generally accepted but questionable notion that having a spouse and kids is the only path to happiness, the role of friendship, the necessity of solitude, and the importance of building a true acquaintance with oneself...

In this poignant and hilarious memoir, the author recalls his childhood in Northern Ireland after the death of his mother when he was just five years old. Raised by his beloved but often overwhelmed father alongside his ten siblings (divided into three classes - the Big Ones, the Middle Ones, and the Wee Ones ), O'Reilly, one of the Wee Ones, paints a vivid picture of growing up in a large, grief-stricken, eccentric, and fiercely loving family during the tail end of the Troubles...

This is a remarkable and very necessary book that is not so much about idleness as it is a call to examine our lives and our choices, and to do a better job of living than we currently do. Hodgkinson’s definition of idleness is not that we sit around and do nothing, but that we build enough down-time into our lives that we can make the time to think, to read, to reflect, to appreciate art, and to engage in rewarding and hands-on activities like cooking, gardening, engaging with the natural world, and having good times with friends and family, doing things that truly bring us joy...

This book is many things, it is philosophy, memoir, general life advice and musings on a life well lived. It’s unusual in its structure in that it is not a straight-line narrative in which ideas build on each other. Rosen does not have a theory of happiness or a five-step plan to a happier life. While the word is in the title, he doesn't really talk about happiness in the narrative. He's thinking less in terms of how to be happy and more in terms of what we can do to have a good day.

This is a book about building and architecture. It's also a book about an idea, the notion of a room of one's own, a cosy private space that we can withdraw into, a place in which to think, read, reflect, and just be for a while, away from the endless demands of a busy world...

In The Garden Against Time, Olivia Laing writes about the unique and wonderful place that gardens occupy in our lives. She writes about the soul satisfying experience of being in green spaces made all the more meaningful when we take a hand at creating them. She examines the notion of a garden as a personal paradise, and shares how the time she spent working in her garden has transformed her, and enhanced her own experience of life...

This book was published in 1987, when the writer and critic was 52 years old. The focus of this memoir is her tempestuous relationship with her mother, something that morphed and shifted as Gornick herself grew older, but always remained intense and challenging...