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eve_prime's review
5.0
This is a truly lovely book that I should make a point of reading a second time, soon. I confess that when the first chapter started explaining how the author had been feeling burnt out, stopped reading books, and was spending too much time doom-scrolling that my thought was, “Oh, yet another one of THOSE books,” because yes, I’ve read multiple books about the problems people have with putting their attention where they want it to be, and in this case I assumed that she was then going to tell us how reigniting her sense of wonder helped her become happy again. Well, she did, in a sense, but her writing was so much deeper, richer, and fresher than I was expecting. Even though the core message about the importance of wonder is one I’d internalized a great many years ago, I really enjoyed this author’s voice. She had very interesting things to say about swimming in the ocean (the English Channel really, I suppose), handling bees, trying to encourage her young son to value nature, and so on, and she also wrote about very interesting things that I hadn’t known before, like the Brocken Spectre phenomenon. I recommend this book, and I’m now looking forward to reading her other two too.
beccastar_galactica's review against another edition
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
autumnchild's review against another edition
It was advertised as partly memoir, partly self-help book but in reality it's just a series of disjointed journal entries that left me quite sad. I was hoping for a more uplifting read.
tbf9002's review
4.0
I wish I had more time to reflect and ponder on her stories ;) but I did get a few wonderful ideas I’ll try to implement in my life -
“I think I'm beginning to understand that the quest is the point. Our sense of enchantment is not triggered only by grand things; the sublime is not hiding in distant landscapes. The awe-inspiring, the numinous, is all around us, all the time. It is transformed by our deliberate attention. It becomes valuable when we value it. It becomes meaningful when we invest it with meaning. The magic is of our own conjuring.”
Which also means - this isn’t limited by your environs, you can make enchantment out of nearly anything.
“I think I'm beginning to understand that the quest is the point. Our sense of enchantment is not triggered only by grand things; the sublime is not hiding in distant landscapes. The awe-inspiring, the numinous, is all around us, all the time. It is transformed by our deliberate attention. It becomes valuable when we value it. It becomes meaningful when we invest it with meaning. The magic is of our own conjuring.”
Which also means - this isn’t limited by your environs, you can make enchantment out of nearly anything.