Take a walk with February's book of the month

All books are a journey, but some take the idea more literally than others. A road trip; a voyage into space; or even a criminal on the run: all stories that take us from one place to another.

The journey that Craig Mod takes in our February book of the month, Things Become Other Things, is another kind: a pilgrimage. Or, at least, he decides to put on his shoes and follow the trails taken by centuries of pilgrims to the ancient shrines on Japan’s rugged and remote Kii peninsula.

When Mod begins his 300-mile walk, I didn’t know where it was going to end. But by the final page, I didn’t want it to finish.

This book is a series of vignettes and meditations, as Mod carefully observes the environment around him, brings life to the people he meets, and digs into his own experiences as a kid in rustbelt America and an adult interloper in Japan. This is a book about how things change and how they stay the same. It’s a book about friendship and families and how traditions pass along. Most of all, this is a book about paying attention.

Its approach makes this book different to many of our other picks. Things Become Other Things is a memoir (officially, according to the subtitle, A Walking Memoir) and it has a greater amount of personal introspection than our typical reads. But there’s a depth and beauty that welcome you in, as well as themes we have visited in previous picks—landscape, history, memory, culture.

Things Become Other Things, which was released last May, was named a best book of the year by Kirkus and Smithsonian, among others, and Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell—who knows a thing or two about writing—says it’s “luminous, poignant, unflinching and kind… a future classic of its genre.”

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