Can a building make you happy—or quietly chip away at your mental health?

That question caught me off guard when I picked up Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness from the library. I’d recently read On Confidence, from his School of Life organisation, and was reminded how much I’ve enjoyed his previous work. This volume caught my eye—partly through familiarity, partly through curiosity. Could architecture really shape our emotional lives?

De Botton argues that the physical environment—buildings, homes, public spaces—does far more to shape our mood than we typically acknowledge. This isn’t a book about design tips or architectural history; it’s a gentle, probing exploration of how our surroundings reflect and influence who we are.

It made me reconsider how Wendy and I make decisions about our home. We tend to ask, ‘Does this look nice?’—not, ‘Will this make us feel more at peace here?’ We’ve recently used a lot of Mizzle, and even at their most florid, Farrow & Ball’s copywriters don’t mention an impact on mood. But perhaps they should. If de Botton is right—and he makes a compelling case—then colour, shape, texture, and proportion aren’t just aesthetic flourishes; they’re part of the emotional architecture of our lives.

I was particularly struck by his critique of brutalism. It’s a style I’ve long admired—solid, unapologetic, defiantly ugly in a way I find rather beautiful. But this book unsettled that affection. Would I really want to live with exposed concrete walls? Could I stand that level of severity every day?

There’s a difference, I realised, between architectural admiration and emotional sustenance. Striking buildings might please the eye or stimulate the mind—but they don’t always nourish the soul. De Botton argues that beauty isn’t always bold or dramatic. Sometimes it’s quiet, human, and oddly hard to describe until you step into a space that just feels right.

That was the shift for me. I’d thought of architecture as something to look at, or photograph, or analyse—like sculpture on a civic scale. But The Architecture of Happiness reframes it as something intimate and daily: the backdrop to our moods, our habits, our lives.

It’s a gentle, intelligent, and quietly radical book. I’d recommend it to anyone curious about how the spaces we inhabit end up shaping us in return.

I picked up Hunchback out of curiosity—it’s a hugely successful Japanese novel by disabled author Saou Ichikawa, translated by Polly Barton—and it turned out to be unlike anything I’ve read before.

The story revolves around a profoundly disabled protagonist residing in a care home, whose primary outlet for self-expression is writing and publishing erotic fiction. Over the course of this short, engaging novel, the central character begins exploring sexual fantasies with a care worker, a premise that immediately raises complex ethical and philosophical questions.

Ichikawa handles these sensitive themes deftly and with nuance, inviting reflection on the nature and philosophy of sexual desire, the boundaries of consent, and the societal norms that shape our perceptions of sexuality, especially within the context of disability. What’s particularly striking about the book is its ability to balance depth with humour—there’s an undeniable comedic undertone throughout, which enriches rather than detracts from its exploration of challenging topics.

Despite its brevity—I read it in a single sitting—the book left me with plenty of food for thought, and I’ve continued contemplating its themes since finishing it. This is a refreshingly original novel, one I’d wholeheartedly recommend for its thoughtful yet human exploration of rarely addressed topics.

Having recently enjoyed On Confidence, I decided to delve deeper into the writing from The School of Life, and this charming little volume immediately caught my eye. Physically, it’s delightful: slim, cloth-bound, beautifully designed, and thoroughly pleasing to handle and read.

The book comprises a series of short, reflective chapters, each addressing aspects of emotional maturity, personal development, and growth. Rather than adopting the didactic tone of self-help guides, the writing is thoughtful and gently philosophical. It’s less about prescriptive solutions and more about offering insightful reflections.

While I enjoyed reading this, I didn’t encounter many novel ideas. Instead, its strength lies in how clearly and engagingly familiar concepts are presented. It serves as a valuable reminder of the importance of emotional growth, mindfulness, and self-awareness.

One aspect of the book that gave me pause was its critical stance towards formal education—an inherent theme of the book, suggesting schools overlook essential life lessons. Though I appreciated the book’s viewpoint, I found myself partially disagreeing. Schools might not prepare individuals comprehensively for every emotional or practical challenge in life, but it’s unreasonable to expect they fully should. Personal development is, after all, a lifelong endeavour extending far beyond the classroom.

Overall, What They Forgot to Teach You at School is a thoughtful, attractively presented book that I’d readily recommend. It may not revolutionise your worldview, but it might remind you of valuable lessons worth revisiting.

This book had frequently been recommended to me over the years, particularly in medical circles, but somehow I’d never got around to reading it until now. John Berger’s text, accompanied by evocative photographs by Jean Mohr, paints a literary portrait of a rural doctor practising in England in the 1960s.

The book offers a fascinating, often moving insight into the life and work of Dr John Sassall, the independent-minded physician who serves his community through both home visits and work at the local hospital. Sassall emerges as a charismatic, somewhat idiosyncratic figure who embodies the traditional paternalistic notion of a doctor as a pillar of the community, deeply embedded within the social fabric of his village.

Reading an original 1960s library edition added an extra layer of reflection for me, prompting consideration of how dramatically medicine has evolved over the intervening decades, even while the central aim and values of the profession have stayed the same. The absence of today’s omnipresent healthcare bureaucracy—management structures, commissioning—is striking. Sassall operates with remarkable independence, personally determining what’s best for his patients without the layers of accountability and oversight common today. On the one hand, this autonomy clearly benefits the community when a practitioner is dedicated and insightful, as Sassall appears to be. Yet, viewed through a contemporary lens, the lack of checks and balances feels risky, particularly given Sassall’s single-handed practice. Nobody can know everything, and it’s a worry to wonder how Sassall managed patients with conditions he knew less about without evidence-based guidelines to draw upon.

Equally thought-provoking is the book’s portrayal of the doctor’s role as a confidant and central social figure. While it was common during my medical training to hear that doctors had replaced priests as the recipients of people’s innermost worries, I wonder whether that’s still true today. It seems medicine, and perhaps society itself, has moved on. Healthcare feels more transactional and commodified, further from the deeply personal, community-rooted interactions described by Berger.

A Fortunate Man provided me with much food for thought, exploring both the continuity and considerable change in the medical profession. It’s a reflective and engaging work that I’d recommend highly—not just to medical colleagues, but to anyone interested in the shifting relationships between doctors, patients, and the communities they serve.

The photo is a background detail of a photo from the book, noting the times at which smoking is permitted on the ward. It seems strikingly old-fashioned, until I remember that smoking rooms were still common is hospitals when I started my training. It’s amazing how quickly society—and our perceptions of it—can change.

A hotel room I recently checked into had a small bookshelf, which was nice. This was one of four volumes squeezed between two unmatched bookends.

I have a vague cultural awareness of The School of Life: I enjoy and follow Alain de Botton’s writing, so I heard about this project when he founded it. The School of Life Press is a small offshoot, and I was mildly intrigued to see what it offered.

I therefore plucked this from the shelf and dived in, reading it from cover to cover in a single sitting (it’s quite short).

It discusses confidence as a learned skill, which is always a helpful reminder. The cover image of a ship being tossed by the waves exemplifies this: the new seafarer will be terrified, whereas the old hand has learned to trust the ship and so is confident in even the roughest waters.

That observation probably isn’t new to you, and that’s typical of this book. It’s a concise summary of well-worn wisdom, but it doesn’t have much new to say. There was one observation that was new to me: that those who see the good in others are likely to be less confident themselves, as they tend to place a higher value on the opinions of others (rather than seeing everyone else as idiotic and therefore relying on one’s own view and drive).

I’d have enjoyed a meatier and more challenging book on the topic, with a little more personality to it… but then again, a book like that would probably be too long and divisive to be left in a hotel room.

It was certainly more welcome than a bedside Bible.

This 2011 debut novel was much-acclaimed—but passed me by completely. When I came across some of the extensive praise for it recently, I thought I’d take it out of the library to see what all the fuss was about.

It’s a slim novel in 19 chapters, each of which presents an individual vignette. It is narrated by the youngest of three brothers who were born to teenage parents in 1980s rural New York. The chronologically presented chapters take us through their childhood, exploring their close knit family unit until it loosens as the boys come of age.

I have to confess that I didn’t really enjoy this. There is something about novels narrated by children that I struggle to connect with, even (or perhaps especially) when they are critically acclaimed. I often find their perspective a little unbelievable, and the device of imaging what a child sees in adult relationships tends to come off as a little twee to me. The effect is to reduce the emotional impact of the plot, which seems a shame when it is as loaded as in this book.

I suppose this just wasn’t for me.

This novel had been much-recommended—but I will admit that I approached it with a degree of reticence given that it extends to 656 pages, and my edition weighs just shy of a kilogram. Reading shouldn’t be this much of a workout.

The novel is set over the course of a year, beginning in the spring of 2021. The main character is Campbell Flynn, a wealthy and privileged academic art historian who is also a sort of public intellectual, appearing on Newsnight and the like to pontificate on all sorts. The heart of the story is about the impact on his life of one of his students, Milo Manghasa.

Campbell grew up in working-class Glasgow; but an Oxbridge degree, a move to London and a marriage into an aristocratic family perhaps softened his zeal for truly left-wing reform. Outspoken Milo, who has a fierce intellect, lives his left-wing views—which beguiles Campbell, even as he doesn’t quite understand what’s happening.

This book has been called ‘Dickensian’ for its ‘state of the nation’ portrayal of Britain. Like Dickens, it has a sprawling cast list which I slightly struggled to keep up with; but also like Dickens, the quality of the writing kept me steaming on through regardless.

It doesn’t, however, have the humour of Dickens, and I missed that element. There are witty and biting turns of phrase, but no real comic relief. There were also no real twists or turns in the story—this was a novel of slow, relentless destruction, which contributed to its heaviness.

All of which is to say… I really enjoyed this, and I’m glad I stuck with it, but I’m not sure it earned its length.

This has been recommended to me many times since it was first published in 2015. I’ve slightly put off reading it as I thought it might be a bit dry. It wasn’t.

The book is about the last sailing of the Lusitania, the passenger liner whose sinking in 1915 by a German U-boat made a major contribution to the US’s decision to abandon neutrality and fight for the allies in the First World War.

This was a properly riveting read, with chapters shifting between intimate portraits of life on board that final voyage, the submariners on board U-20, the code breakers in London, and President Wilson in the White House. I appreciated too that Larson didn’t answer every question. The reasoning behind some of the decisions which led to Lusitania’s sinking are lost to history, and Larson reflects that rather than trying to tie up every loose end.

This comes highly recommended.

This book was recommended by lots of bookish writers so often that I bought it without really knowing much about it. The blurb gave me a signpost:

David Starr Jordan was a taxonomist, a man possessed with bringing order to the natural world. In time, he would be credited with discovering nearly a fifth of the fish known to humans in his day. But the more of the hidden blueprint of life he uncovered, the harder the universe seemed to try to thwart him. His specimen collections were demolished by lightning, by fire, and eventually by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake—which sent more than a thousand discoveries, housed in fragile glass jars, plummeting to the floor. In an instant, his life’s work was shattered.

Many might have given up, given in to despair. But Jordan? He surveyed the wreckage at his feet, found the first fish that he recognized, and confidently began to rebuild his collection. And this time, he introduced one clever innovation that he believed would at last protect his work against the chaos of the world.

When NPR reporter Lulu Miller first heard this anecdote in passing, she took Jordan for a fool—a cautionary tale in hubris, or denial. But as her own life slowly unraveled, she began to wonder about him. Perhaps instead he was a model for how to go on when all seemed lost. What she would unearth about his life would transform her understanding of history, morality, and the world beneath her feet.

From this, I expected a slightly twee inspirational story linking this esoteric moment of scientific discovery to Miller’s own challenges, and to conclude with a sweet reflection on the nature of resilience.

I think it’s best to go into this blind, so I won’t say too much, other than: blimey, I underestimated this. This is quite unlike anything I’ve ever read before: part biography, part memoir, part biology, part philosophy. It is beautifully written, with Miller’s passion and curiosity dripping from every page. She clearly poured her heart into this—and it feels like this is the perfect cultural moment for it.

This was so good that I ended up photographing quotations and sending them to Wendy on WhatsApp as I read—I can’t remember doing that before.

It’s less than 200 pages, and I think it is well worth anyone’s time.

I highlighted lots in this book; here are some good bits that hopefully don’t spoil anything:

Imagine seeing thirty years of your life undone in one instant. Imagine whatever it is you do all day, whatever it is you care about, whatever you foolishly pick and prod at each day, hoping, against all signs that suggest otherwise, that it matters. Imagine finding all the progress you’ve made on that endeavour smashed and eviscerated at your feet.

The “soul-ache … vanishes,” he writes, “with active out-of-door life and the consequent flow of good health.” He claims that salvation lies in the electricity of our bodies. “Happiness comes from doing, helping, working, loving, fighting, conquering,” he writes in a syllabus from around the same time, “from the exercise of functions; from self-activity.” Don’t overthink it, I think, is his point. Enjoy the journey. Savour the small things. The “luscious” taste of a peach, the “lavish” colours of tropical fish, the rush from exercise that allows one to experience “the stern joy which warriors feel.”

To some people a dandelion might look like a weed, but to others that same plant can be so much more. To an herbalist, it’s a medicine—a way of detoxifying the liver, clearing the skin, and strengthening the eyes. To a painter, it’s a pigment; to a hippie, a crown; a child, a wish. To a butterfly, it’s sustenance; to a bee, a mating bed; to an ant, one point in a vast olfactory atlas.

And so it must be with humans, with us. From the perspective of the stars or infinity or some eugenic dream of perfection, sure, one human life might not seem to matter. It might be a speck on a speck, soon gone. But that was just one of infinite perspectives. From the perspective of an apartment in Lynchburg, Virginia, that very same human could be so much more. A stand-in mother. A source of laughter. A way of surviving one’s darkest years.

One day, while riding bikes along the Potomac River, she started racing me, and I couldn’t catch her. I ran five miles most days. And I couldn’t catch her. I liked that feeling. Her mind was faster than mine, too. She could drum up dazzling rants about tentative drivers, about scrambled eggs, about people who sign their emails with only one initial. “Are you that busy?!” she groaned. “Are you that beholden to the cult of overwork that you need to communicate that you do not even have those four milliseconds to spare?” She had a way with words.

The best way of ensuring that you don’t miss them, these gifts, the trick that has helped me squint at the bleakness and see them more clearly, is to admit, with every breath, that you have no idea what you are looking at. To examine each object in the avalanche of Chaos with curiosity, with doubt. Is this storm a bummer? Maybe it’s a chance to get the streets to yourself, to be licked by raindrops, to reset. Is this party as boring as I assume it will be? Maybe there will be a friend waiting, with a cigarette in her mouth, by the back door of the dance floor, who will laugh with you for years to come, who will transmute your shame to belonging.

My wife stirs in bed next to me. She slaps my shoulder. “Pipe down, Flipper,” she mumbles. Referring to the fact that I am flipping, tossing and turning, unable to sleep. She wants me only to join her in peace, in slumber, in the soft cotton waves of our powder-blue sheets. I clutch the brimming warmth of her thigh and think about the fact that even at its most hopeful, my measly brain could have never dreamt up something as infinitely intoxicating as her.

If I told you that a man stole billions of pounds worth of historical art purely for the love of it, doing nothing with it but hanging it in his bedroom in his mum’s attic, you’d surely want to read more. I certainly did, and Michael Finkel’s non-fiction account of Stéphane Breitwieser’s crimes did not disappoint.

Finkel weaves a propulsive tale, reaching from the fine detail of how Breitwieser stole individual pieces to asking questions about the nature of museums, crime, culpability and even art itself. It’s also a love story, exploring Brietwieser’s intense but complex relationships with his girlfriend, his mother and his father.

This was enormous, astonishing fun. I’d have liked a dash more of the reflection, philosophy and doubt, but this short is still worth your time.

Here are some passages that struck a chord with me:

He feels no remorse when he steals because museums, in his deviant view, are really just prisons for art. They’re often crowded and noisy, with limited visiting hours and uncomfortable seats, offering no calm place to reflect or recline.

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Instead of an art thief, Breitwieser prefers to be thought of as an art collector with an unorthodox acquisition style. Or, if you will, he’d like to be called an art liberator.

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Before working art crime, Darties had spent a decade in antiterrorism. He sees parallels between art thieves and terrorists—crimes that destabilize society, with psychological fallout.

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When you wear your heart on your sleeve, it’s exposed to the elements.