Poetry & Verse
Religion & Spirituality
288 pages
Pub date: 21 August 2026
Four stars 🌟🌟🌟🌟
My thoughts:
I look forward to starting my day with this book. Since I received it in June, I began right there with an entry on flip flops that truly evoked summer. I then looked at the beginning of the book and felt the tenderness of January 4th’s entry about when the author got his first library card. Those who adore reading will go a bit pitter-pat when they come to that one.
Each day offers a short reflection. Best of all, there is something to read for the entire year. Enjoy these entries along with the occasional illustrations.
Recommended as a nice way to start one’s day.
Many thanks to NetGalley and Ave Maria Press for this title. All opinions are my own.
Description:
from the publisher
Wonder Is a Lovely Place to Be gathers 365 essays, poems, and sketches from Brian Doyle, revealing his keen eye for grace and an imagination shaped by his Catholic faith. Drawing from both beloved and previously unpublished works, this collection invites readers to notice holiness woven through ordinary, everyday moments.
With a keen eye for detail—the slap of flip-flops on pavement, a kindergartener released to the playground with arms flung open and untied shoes, a no-look pass in a neighborhood pickup basketball game—Doyle shapes small moments into stories and aims them straight at the human heart. His writing is a summons to live with wide eyes and open hearts in a fragile world: “Do not tire, do not despair, . . . be relentless, be merry, . . . be alert, be attentive—for there is holiness all around us like an ocean.” In Doyle’s vision, holiness lives in pain as much as it does in joy, and “no moment is mundane, every moment is a miracle, every moment is a meal.”
Doyle wrote everywhere—on envelopes, inside book jackets, on the backs of menus—driven by the conviction that we are “here so briefly” and called, each day, to “see clear” and “bring [our] best selves to bear.” Some of these fragments became essays published around the world; many others remained scattered across his desk like driftwood from a life immersed in language. Now his wife, Mary Miller Doyle, gathers his writing—including never-before-seen stories, poems, sketches, and even cartoons—into a daily collection that invites readers into his sacred imagination on all year long.
A born story catcher, Brian Doyle was a master of the brief essay, the tight poem, and the achingly beautiful anecdote. Though the magazine editor, novelist, and author of One Long River of Song and A Book of Uncommon Prayer died of brain cancer at sixty, readers continue to return to his work for the way it reveals the joyful, wild mystery of holiness humming through all things.
Advance Praise
“Daily doses of wonder and inspiration from a brilliant writer who drew and was gone much too soon. I stole so much joy from the pictures and words in this collection, and so will you.”
Austin Kleon
New York Times bestselling author of Steal Like an Artist
“Wonder Is a Lovely Place to Be peeks inside the life and mind of Brian Doyle, the most curious and creative writer (and amateur artist) whose pen ever danced across the page, leaving a legacy of wit and wisdom in his wake. If you’ve long loved Brian’s poetic, playful, daring, and startling way with words, you will leap at the chance to hold more in your hands. And if you’re new to Brian’s brilliance, what a joy awaits you in these pages! A daily dose of Brian Doyle is a lovely place to be.”
Laura Kelly Fanucci
Author of Living Easter
“Brian Doyle had a rare gift for catching grace as it flew by and setting it gently on the page. This book is a yearlong invitation to see the world with a sacramental imagination and to discover holiness hiding in plain sight.”
Fr. Edwin Obermiller, CSC
Special assistant to the vice president for university relations for the University of Portland
Joyce's mystery and fiction book reviews with some non-fiction too! 