A professor of English literature, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst sets out in this books to share his love for reading and to gently nudge those of us who have either never experienced, or have forgotten, the act of slow and leisurely reading — the sort of reading that we probably did quite naturally when we were children...

This is an insightful memoir that intertwines the author's experiences as a long-distance runner with his thoughts on writing, life, and aging, Murakami uses his passion for running, which he took up in his early thirties, as a central metaphor for his life and his craft. He explores how the dedication, perseverance, and even the pain of long-distance running mirror the challenges and rewards of writing...

Matthew Crawford is a philosophy graduate turned think-tank employee turned motorcycle mechanic. An unusual trajectory that gives him a unique insight into life on both sides of the white-and blue-collar divide. It is his contention in this book, that it’s time to rethink and perhaps upend the narrative that higher education and knowledge work offer the only path to a successful and fulfilling life...

William Dalrymple has a marvellous ability to write history that reads like a novel. This book is a narrative adventure in which he writes about the British in India during the 18th century, the relationship that soldiers and officers of the East India Company had with the people of India, Hindu and Muslim that they lived among. This was a time when they made an effort to learn Indian languages, understand the customs and the culture, take on local ways of living and being, and assimilated in more ways than one...

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...

Nicholas Carr has been writing about technology and the effect it has on us for more than a decade. In this book he traces the development of communication technologies right from the letters that people began writing to each other millennia ago, to the development of printing and newspapers, to the telegraph and telephone, to mass media like radio and TV, all the way to the internet and social media...

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...

The Swerve is a book about a book, On the Nature of Things by Lucretius, a work of philosophy that attempts to explain the nature of the world that we live in, and tries to lay out what it is that makes for a good human life. This was a work that was well known in Ancient Greece, but was since lost. It was rediscovered six hundred years ago, at a time when most of the wisdom and knowledge of the ancient word had been lost....and it became one of the many forces that inspired the renaissance...

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...