Editor's note: This week's Page Turner interview is with Tom Wooding, a retired attorney and the treasurer of the Friends of the Library group.

“Two books I can recommend are by Alain de Botton. In ‘The Art of Travel,' he suggests sometimes you've brought along all the concerns you wanted to escape while on vacation. His travel itinerary is often idiosyncratic, as when he goes off to trace the origins of the ‘fresh-caught' tuna found in his London supermarket, a journey that takes him to some very non-touristy locales in East Africa.

“The second book is ‘The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work.' Again he explores some off-beat paths. One example: He investigates what it is like to be an aerospace engineer at the European Space Launch Facility – a cushy-sounding job, except that it's located in French Guiana.

“The latest novel by Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Russo, ‘That Old Cape Magic,' is a semi-comic story about marriage and families – told by a narrator in the midst of all these forces. He cleverly moves his characters about so they intersect and arranges their preferences and backgrounds so the friction created by opposites can occur.

“Russo is good at description, at creating characters and is very good at dialogue. Many of his one-liner ‘zingers' will, I predict, have you laughing out loud.

“Another gear shift – this time to a cookbook , a sandwich cookbook, by Tom Colicchio. Its punning title is “'wichcraft: Craft a Sandwich into a Meal, and a Meal into a Sandwich.' Beautiful photos accompany the recipes. How about a kumquat-rosemary marmalade-with-goat cheese sandwich? Or a cheddar, smoked ham, poached pear and mustard sandwich? You'll also find Colicchio's thoughts about ‘sandwich architecture.'

“A coffee table-size book, ‘Houses of the National Trust,' will take you on a whirlwind tour of the 350 or so properties that are open to the public. These buildings span a thousand years of British history and include everything from castles and country houses to windmills and tithe barns, from thatched cottages and Victorian pubs to theatres and lighthouses. It's fun being an armchair tourist – and a bit exhausting, too, so take this book, by Lydia Greeves, in small doses.

“For those with a scientific bent, there's a new book by Oxford University professor Martin Brasier, ‘Darwin's Lost World: The Hidden History of Animal Life.' It proposes an answer to Darwin's question – what caused the so-called Cambrian explosion, where animals suddenly developed skeletons and shells and jaws and teeth?

“And one more, published in the early 1960s: Donald Hall's ‘String Too Short to Be Saved: Recollections of Summers on a New England Farm.' Hallis a gifted writer, and this book contains recollections about his grandparents and others in rural New England in the 1940s and '50s.”