Everyday Beauty

Rapt

Winifred Gallagher · 2009

Gallagher was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer and decided to spend the treatment paying attention to things she actually liked rather than to the disease. The book that came out of it argues that a life is largely made of what you choose to attend to, and she has the research to back it. Practical, unsentimental, and the best case there is for why noticing is not a soft skill.

“It didn’t take me long to learn that the discipline of writing about delight yielded more delight.”

The Art of Noticing

Rob Walker · 2019

A practical, playful book full of small exercises for paying better attention: ways to look, listen and notice more in ordinary places. Walker treats attention as a muscle you can train, and the effect of reading him is immediate. You walk out of the house afterwards and the same old street is quietly full of things you had stopped seeing. A genuinely useful little book.

On Looking

Alexandra Horowitz · 2013

Horowitz takes eleven walks around the same block, each time with a different expert, a geologist, a sound designer, a small child, and discovers how much any one of us misses. It is a delightful demonstration that the world is far richer than our hurried glance suggests, and that beauty is often a question of who, and how, we are looking. It will change your next walk.

Late Migrations

Margaret Renkl · 2019

A collection of short, luminous essays that move between the natural world of a suburban back garden and the life of a family. Renkl finds the whole of love, loss and wonder in bluebirds, caterpillars and the changing light, proving that you do not need wilderness to find beauty. Tender and gorgeously written, it is a book to read slowly, one small piece at a time.

A Room with a View

E. M. Forster · 1908

A young woman’s awakening to beauty, passion and her own true feelings, set against the light of Italy and the constraints of Edwardian England. Forster is really writing about the difference between merely existing and actually seeing, and his heroine’s slow opening to the beauty of life is quietly thrilling. A warm, wise novel about choosing to really look.

The Summer Book

Tove Jansson · 1972

A grandmother and her small granddaughter spend a summer on a tiny Finnish island, and almost nothing happens, exquisitely. Jansson finds enormous beauty in the smallest things: a beetle, a storm, a carved bone. It is a masterclass in the richness of ordinary attention, and a reminder that a whole world of wonder can fit on a few square metres of rock and moss.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Betty Smith · 1943

A young girl grows up poor in early twentieth-century Brooklyn, and Betty Smith fills that hard, ordinary world with startling beauty: a tree pushing through pavement, a penny’s worth of sweets, the light on a tenement stair. It is a masterclass in finding wonder where there is little money and less ease. Quietly luminous.

Cannery Row

John Steinbeck · 1945

Steinbeck turns a shabby stretch of Monterey waterfront, with its drifters, shopkeepers and one marine biologist, into something oddly radiant. He looks at overlooked, unglamorous lives and finds them full of grace. A short, warm novel that retrains your eye to see the loveliness in the ordinary.