Reading on a Walk: books on simplicity, wabi sabi and the small joys of food

Every so often, the books I am reading start talking to each other. That is what happened this summer. Two very different titles — one on the quiet philosophy of Wabi Sabi, the other a collection of food memories — kept circling back to the same idea: joy does not need to be complicated. It just needs room to breathe.

The Beauty of Imperfect Things

I started reading a book on Wabi Sabi on my journey to Uzbekistan and its message stayed with me longer than I expected. At its heart, Wabi Sabi is about finding beauty in imperfection, in the natural, the aged, the unfinished.

What stayed, was how emotional this philosophy becomes once you begin bringing it into your own lifestyle. The book does not ask for a renovation. It asks for a shift in what you notice: the grain in a wooden bowl, the uneven edge of a hand-thrown ceramic mug, linen that wrinkles instead of staying stiff or a soft word from a stranger.

Natural materials, handmade textures, patterns borrowed from the outside world — these are not decorations: they are small, quiet reminders that simplicity does not come from perfection. It comes from letting things be what they are. Reading it, I kept thinking about how much energy we spend chasing perfection, and how much peace is sitting right there in the unpolished version of our own homes and of ourselves. Loved that!

Food as Memory, Food as Comfort

The second book took me somewhere completely different, and yet not really. It is a collection of memories built around food — meals cooked at home, dishes and flavours stumbled into while traveling, the kind of eating that is not about the recipe so much as the moment around it.

What I loved is how the book treats food less as a subject and more as a container for something else: comfort, connection, the particular way a smell can pull you back into a kitchen from years ago. It is a book for foodies, yes, but really it is a book about how we hold onto joy: a shared meal on a trip, a dish someone taught you without meaning to teach you anything. These are not grand moments. They are small ones that happened to stick.

The Thread Between Them

Put side by side, these two books ended up saying something similar: that ease and simplicity are not the absence of meaning — they are often where meaning lives. Whether it is a home shaped by natural materials or a table set with something simple and familiar, the invitation is the same: slow down and notice what is already there.

That is the walk I have been lately — not far, but slow, and worth it.

— Reading on a Walk