It’s strange how particular themes keep repeating themselves in the books I have read recently, even though on the face of it the books themselves are very different one from another. The idea, for example, that looking at a work of art should open up the landscape of one’s mind or that the process of traveling to unfamiliar places should provoke a corresponding interior journey.  These are motifs that have come up time and again in books I have been reading this year. Is it nothing more than coincidence? Or am I somehow subconsciously looking to read the same book over and over again or picking books that illuminate from different vantage points very basic questions about why we travel and why we look at art?

In A Month in Siena, Hisham Matar, a Pulitzer prize-winning writer with Libyan heritage and with deep roots in London and New York, travels to Italy to immerse himself in the School of Sienese painting which flourished in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. He writes about his encounters with eight masterworks from the School, painted by Duccio, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and others. The works under Matar’s scrutiny and through his telling become doorways to the city of Siena, to its ancient traditions, to some of its residents, to the author himself, and to the wider world.

Matar has written a small gem of a book.  His curiosity, intelligence, and humanity not only illuminate a lovely and profound account of his time in Siena. Those same qualities are trustworthy pointers to how to live as we enter a new year.