I have read Winter three times, and with each reading, my admiration for the talent of Rick Bass grows.

As a writer, I favor economy and distillation as a means of mining the essence of a subject, which Bass demonstrates with his poetic yet conversational style.

He focuses on natural beauty, seeing the hidden connections around us, like deer antlers resembling tree branches. To read Winter is to live inside the wilderness he describes. His reverence for this world abounds on every page.

If you’ve ever fantasized about restoring a crumbling medieval Italian villa, then you’ll get to live that experience vicariously through this memoir.

The author has a wonderful sense of the absurd as she recounts her family’s multi-year efforts to turn a roofless villa into their dream home, complete with a complicated teenage daughter who is trying to find her way in the rural Italian countryside where the family has been transplanted.

Brimming with idiosyncratic and endearing characters. 

Also not specifically set in Ireland, this book reveals in wonderful detail what life was like in the great manor houses of both England and Ireland. Such houses distinguished the 17th century from the age of castles and fortresses, and were lavishly constructed and furnished as tangible statements of power and wealth. You’ll learn what daily life was like from chambermaid to earl.

I have lived in modest quarters all my life. I believe it would scramble my sense of self if I moved to an opulent, showy house. Home is identity; identity is home.

This is a collection of short memoir pieces by women about the concept of home. In these essays, women bring spouses, children, parents, pets, languages, plants, neighbors, and nature into their home worlds, seeking and sometimes finding comfort and peace. Or, feeling the lack of a home, they travel the world to look for one.

In a sense, this book is about all the searching women do just to feel right with ourselves. Just to find a place where our interior worlds can flourish.

I know I'm unfashionably late to the party on this story, but I haven't seen anyone saying exactly this about it: Mexican Gothic makes an incredible amount of sense in its own context. That's rare and fun in a horror story, especially one in the gothic subgenre. NOTHING happens arbitrarily in Mexican Gothic! That makes the whole plot worse/better in the best of ways.

And now, the part you've doubtless already heard about this novel. The characters are engaging and deeply human (yes, even that guy, unfortunately). I especially love that in their own ways, all the characters are a little greedy about something. Greed instigates many entertaining interactions among the characters, and with their deliciously creepy world.

Emily Dickinson’s Gardening Life adds new growth to familiar portraits of the iconic poet. Eccentric she surely was. But a more complete picture of her emerges from this book than from any Dickinson biography I’ve paged through.

McDowell allows Dickinson’s life story, actions, words, and writing to provide biographical insights through a lens of gardening activities and household chores. Dickinson’s love of gardens and plants is well known. She engaged in the hobby year-round. Like plants need sunlight and air to survive, so did the woman who emerges from these pages. She becomes less the housebound recluse hiding in her bedroom, and more a real person engaging with the world on her own terms.

Another profound critique of “civilized” values. Thoreau is like Plato in that he always drills down to bedrock truth: What is it that makes for a good life? Individually and collectively?

Be prepared for longueurs. Those who want a pithier critique along more contemporary lines might enjoy the works of the late Ivan Illich, especially Tools for Conviviality.

While not strictly a book on fashion in Paris, it is a wonderful exploration of all things French after World War II, and one of those things was the Christian Dior couture house. Karnow arrived in Paris in 1947 to study, and soon landed a gig writing for Time magazine. One of his assignments was a cover story on Christian Dior, whose company, in less than a decade, had become so successful it was known as the General Motors of Fashion. In the Dior chapter, Karnow beautifully evokes the mechanisms and machinations of a French couture house, and shows how fashion and Paris were deeply intertwined at the time. The rest of the book is a rollicking good read, too.

This book caught my attention because it involves a house-sitter, just as my series does. But Morag’s story could not be more different. It depicts a terrible sequence of events arising from an innocent house-sitting assignment and a growing love for the place, which I as a reader very much shared. The house itself becomes both the setting and the main threat to the well-being of the ‘half-broken’ characters. The story is hauntingly compelling, the characters deeply likeable, and the writing a real delight. This has been one of my great favourites ever since I first read it.

There’s been a proliferation of books in the last decade about wild and abandoned Scottish islands abundant in puffins and seals, but I have an affection for this, originally published twenty years ago, as it was the first I read and nudged me towards exploring the theme at the opposite extreme edge of Europe. Nicolson actually inherited the Shiant islands in the Hebrides who had bought them, so it’s no wonder he had them to himself, but he also was inspired by that connection and made it his serious mission to explore their nature and history, and uncovered in detail the haunting past of these abandoned islands.