A Year of Mornings: 3191 Miles Apart

Amazon Best Books of the Month, December 2008: Imagine for a second what it would be like if you could see again--in one grand and lovely collection--all of the precious moments you've ever seen. That's what it feels like to flip through A Year of Mornings, and even though the authors have set their sights on their own surroundings, you'll recognize in their photos a familiar, physical sense of joy experienced in daily rituals. Born out of a year-long visual blogging project, the book profiles passing early-morning moments at home shared between two women living 3,191 miles apart. What started as a meeting of two creative minds became a close friendship that went on to inspire a huge community of readers (whose participation in the project is paid tribute at the end with a month-by-month section of the authors' favorite posted comments). As the book progresses from season to season, you can see a kind of kindred vision taking shape between them, so much so that after a while it doesn't really matter which pictures are Stephanie's or which are Maria's. Their story is a welcome reminder that the opportunities to take notice of life's simple beauty are never as rare as you may think. --Anne Bartholomew