Happy by Lonely Planet

A lovely little book perfect for giving and receiving about the different ways you can find personal fulfilment around the world. This being a lonely planet it celebrates the effect that visiting different cultures can have in broadening our own understandings, but also the effect that travel has in defamiliarising our own homes when we do return. Each double page spread is a glossy photograph accompanied by a Secret, Tradition, Date and the place that it is Celbrated, followed by text expanding on the titles. It is divided into three sections, Mind, Body and Spirit and is great to dip into when your spirit needs a little lift

Distinguished Leaves: Poems for Tea Lovers by Elizabeth Darcy Jones

A sweet little book of meditations on the gentle art of tea drinking. The book is in sections dividing the teas into white, green, blue, black, red and yellow with a brief description of what the colours mean. A poem is dedicated to each variety of tea treating them as an individual and speaking about their personality as if they were a person. Some of the poems are a bit slight but there a plenty that speak elegantly of this most ancient tradition of making tea with loose leaves and a meditative spirit

The Careful Use of Compliments by Alexander McCall Smith (Isabel Dalhousie #4)

When Isabel Dalhousie receives an auction catalogue she spots a painting by an author that she has another painting by, and who has been dead for 10 years. Whilst dealing with the emotional fallout from learning she has been ousted as editor of the Journal of Applied Ethics, and getting used to life with a new baby, she bids for the painting. She is outbid, but then approached by the winning bidder and begins to wonder about the painting and its artist. On the one hand, this is the best plot of an Isabel Dalhousie story so far, I love the gentle mystery about a painting, that a possible forgery can be a window into something far sadder and more humane. However, Isabel's new baby son Charlie is unnaturally good, I don't remember new motherhood ever being as benign, but then maybe she is just lucky!

The Four Encounters: Buddha 2 by Osamu Tezuka

The young Prince Siddhartha, the boy who will one day become the Buddha, is growing up, baffled by the stark contrast between the privileges of his life as heir to the throne and those of people around him in a society viciously controlled by caste. He becomes aware of the realities of suffering and death that he has been so assiduously sheltered from, and begins to question the assumed order of his world. Falling in love with a pariah tragedy strikes and Siddhartha increasingly battles with the gulf between his role and his feelings, eventually casting off his life as a priceand all his finery, and hair and becoming a wandering monk.

Tezuka brings together the familiar Buddhist myth with a cast of ordinary people, tragic, hilarious, stupid, drawn with such skill and bringing the story of Siddhartha's inner and outer journeys vividly to life within a landscape and society that are both historic and timeless, with some wonderful anachronisms.

Devadatta: Buddha Book 3 by Osamu Tezuka

Prince Siddhartha, the boy who will one day become the Buddha, has cast off his life as a prince and becomes a monk. Volume 3 of Tezuka's epic chronicles his ordeals, opening with the beautiful boy monk asleep under a tree wakening in full awareness to a new day. We follow him as he meets with the monk Dhepa whose backstory was introduced to us in Volume 1. He takes Siddhartha to meet his master Naradatta introducing him along the way to the ascetic tradition of undertaking ordeals in order to cleanse the self of desire and become purer, entertainingly ridiculed to show how the Buddha began to question this polar opposite to his former regal life and at the end of this volume attains enlightenment.

Tezuka brings together the familiar Buddhist myth with a cast of ordinary people, tragic, hilarious, stupid, drawn with such skill and bringing the story of Siddhartha's inner and outer journeys vividly to life within a landscape and society that are both historic and timeless, with some wonderful anachronisms.