Book of the Day Roundup: December 29, 2025-January 2, 2026
Seeing into the Life of Things
Imagination and the Sacred Encounter
Rodger Kamenetz
Monkfish Book Publishing
Softcover $22.99 (224pp)
978-1-958972-91-5
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Rodger Kamenetz’s Seeing into the Life of Things is a profound guide to exploring the power of images to heal, enhance spiritual development, and foster a sense of oneness with the universe.
To counter the effects of contemporary society’s breakneck pace, constant distractions, and loss of engagement with the natural world, the book urges slowing down, savoring the beauty of nature, and awakening to what it means to be fully alive. In support of its arguments, it turns to Tibetan Buddhist practices and the teachings of Hasidic Judaism, poetry, and dreamwork. The result is an immersive examination of the potential of the human mind, heart, and spirit.
Intimate and thoughtful, the book invites entry into the world of images, shares personal experiences of struggling with spiritual practice, and suggests ways of making the ineffable relatable and the complex simple. For example, its Spots of Time technique invites intense focus on selected memories as a means of deepening one’s connection with the world at the visceral level, and the Blessing Practice is suggested to evoke a state of mindfulness and gratitude for the small, often overlooked blessings in daily life. For an even deeper experience, it suggests accessing the subconscious through dreams and reaching for the Great Opening, a state in which the ego dissolves into mystical awareness. Digressions into poetry, philosophy, and esoteric spiritual practices are illuminating, though they also complicate the narrative in places.
With poetic touches, the spiritual guide Seeing into the Life of Things argues for deep engagement with images, dreams, and memories, as well as time spent in nature. Herein, sacred encounters are available everywhere, just waiting to be found.
KRISTINE MORRIS (October 17, 2025)
Monkey’s Sweet Surprise
A Lunar New Year Mix-Up
Patricia Tanumihardja
Bonnie Lui, illustrator
Picnic Heist Publishing
Hardcover $19.95 (40pp)
979-899227184-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Characters from the Malay and Vietnamese zodiacs celebrate the Lunar New Year in this clever twist on a zodiac tale. Everyone bakes desserts for the Jade Empress’s banquet, but Monkey is still embarrassed by some high-flying hijinks from last year. He plans to make a dessert on his own. When he overhears that his friends are missing ingredients, he rushes to help, leaving his own dessert unfinished. Though his hands are empty, his heart is filled by the love and forgiveness of his friends.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (October 17, 2025)
While the Earth Holds Its Breath
Embracing the Winter Season
Helen Moat
Saraband
Softcover $18.95 (240pp)
978-1-916812-32-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Helen Moat’s pensive, enlightening nature book While the Earth Holds Its Breath
explores ways of coping with the grey darkness of winter across cultures and traditions.
Moat, who struggles with winter’s drizzle and grey mists, determined to “reinvent winter” through a “journey into the inward self.” During COVID-19 lockdowns, she began a gratefulness journal to survive the season, relishing in cooking Irish stews, pastries, and other foods evoking strong memories. She observed the “contours of the land” during hikes through the English countryside and developed acute focus on mindfulness, resisting the “unhealthy habit” of scrolling through disturbing global news about politics and climate change.
Moat’s subsequent two winters included trips to the Welsh Coast, Spain, and northern France to escape the grey. During an uplifting visit to a sunny orchard in Andalusia, Moat observed that she is drawn to snow on distant mountains as a “northern soul.” She reflected on foreign cultures with constructive views of winter too: In Finnish Lapland, for instance, people stay active and “embrace” being present during long polar nights; in Japan, harmony of the elements is emphasized in the acceptance of the four seasons. Moat strove for similar balance in her own life, confessing that her progress was halting and marked with backsliding.
The book contains evocative descriptions of nature, such as a magical early-winter scene illuminated with gossamer spider webs. Humor comes through Moat’s descriptions of hiking with her children through the mucky bog of the moorland, her boots disappearing into the mud. Her coping strategies are inspiring means of struggling with “winter blues,” and her depictions of food, nature, friendships, and travel are clear.
While the Earth Holds Its Breath is a rich, thoughtful memoir about meditating through the winter.
KRISTEN RABE (October 17, 2025)
Mayhem on the Marzipan Express
Rebecca Connolly
Shadow Mountain Publishing
Softcover $18.99 (304pp)
978-1-63993-500-0
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
A baker solves murders during a highland train tour in Rebecca Connolly’s charming cozy mystery novel Mayhem on the Marzipan Express.
Alan is the celebrity judge of a baking show. He promotes himself by hosting a trip for paying fans on board Scotland’s historic Jacobite train, rechristened here as the Marzipan Steam Express. Claire, a former contestant and mentee, helps him bake, and her viscount boyfriend, Johnny, a VIP guest, pitches in. When a man dies, Alan is a suspect.
Claire and Johnny’s fledgling relationship is fleshed out via glancing references to their past adventures as amateur sleuths, and Johnny’s analytical reserve plays well against Claire’s enthusiastic practicality. Indeed, Claire employs finesse as she investigates, avoiding raising panic among the passengers and upholding customer service standards too. A headline-seeking journalist provokes her insecurities, though, even as Alan’s jittery assistant hovers.
Offbeat gallows humor, paired with sometimes farcical side characters, keep the mystery light: Even decapitated gingerbread men are a threat. Mechanical problems, a storm, and impeded outside communication intensify the locked-room scenarios, and dessert-themed pet names and curses like “crepes alive!” appear alongside a winking reference to Agatha Christie. Delectable dishes are centered in kitchen conversations with Alan too.
As the book progresses, details regarding the case appear alongside wise relationship advice. The mystery sometimes takes a back seat to romantic concerns, though. After a second body is found, offstage help is given to confirm the identity of the unhinged killer. Claire and the others’ future plans are covered in a way that lifts the novel back into warm terrain, leading into a satisfying ending in which love and interpersonal connections are emphasized.
Mayhem on the Marzipan Express is an enticing murder mystery wrapped in the language of Scottish confections.
KAREN RIGBY (December 18, 2025)
The Earth Room
Dana Diehl
Black Lawrence Press
Softcover $17.95 (144pp)
978-1-62557-300-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
In Dana Diehl’s haunting short story collection The Earth Room, spectral women are alienated from themselves and others.
In “Daughter,” a woman births a floating ghost daughter following a pregnancy where “Things happened without me making them happen.” Her fragile understanding of her newborn leads to discomforting introspection about her family’s unhappy marriages, her own marriage’s uncertainties, and the persistent, eerie unknowability of her offspring, of whom she asks, “‘Who are you?’” In “At the End of a Tunnel,” a woman who is unable to experience happily-ever-after with others finds solace in trekking through an abandoned mine, where an encounter with mysterious, quasi-fantastical knocking is frightening and exhilarating.
The title story is grimy and enriching. After the all-too-common disorientation and heartbreak of losing a “boyfriend I thought I’d marry,” a woman finds comfort in an intimate’s semi-magical room filled with peat moss and dirt. As her gravitation towards this earth room and what it buries intensifies, she excavates the memories, losses, and parts of herself that she suffocated.
Alongside their earthiness, the vignettes abound with startling, supernatural images. In “I Change You,” a man feels a toxic obsession with how his girlfriend can morph him into animals; he revels in being “a buck in the king’s wood, pursued by baying hounds … a buck on the tundra, wolves’ breath hot against my flank.” Characters’ encounters with other living creatures are bleak and unsettling: a guilty woman who rejects motherhood is haunted by the graphic visual of a piglet’s rotting corpse in “The Sanctuary.” The iciness in some relationships is literalized: on their honeymoon, a woman’s husband disappears without warning into the “‘unpredictable animal’” that is a dangerous glacier.
Frosty and blistering, The Earth Room’s short stories feature mothers, daughters, and lovers unearthing their pasts and thawing their presents.
ISABELLA ZHOU (December 18, 2025)
Kathy Young
