Our family New Year’s celebrations are tame (and aren’t they all these days?). We dipped fondue around a fire, “Zoomed-in” absent family members, and answered questions that forced us to reflect, reminisce, and prophesize. One question asked us to name a book read in 2021 that had changed our lives.

Do books change lives? My husband claimed he was too old to be changed by a book. But after listening to the rest of us report out, even he admitted that reading could change his life, at least a bit.

Our Family Favorites

Within a blink of the eye my daughter named named Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life, a book about fungus of all things that offers a profoundly new way to view the world and our place in it.