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Hello everyone! Welcome to our discussion-based monthly challenge called Themes of Our Lives, a fairly open platform for discussing multiple books centred around a common theme. It could be a book you are already reading this month, giving you a chance to reflect on what you’re reading from another angle, or you could pick a book at the start of the month based on the chosen theme: Exploration, Investigation and Discovery.

All genres and book lengths are permitted: the aim of this challenge is to create an atmosphere for unconventional and inspiring book talk.

I read a lot of science fiction, and the type I like best fits this theme well. Right now I'm working my way through the most excellent, most underrated, series I know, starting with Expendable. We learn a lot about human nature... and aliens' natures, on their own and in interactions.

The second book is especially about the specific words of the definition of the theme as it's a mystery about what caused a plague, why that which cured it did so, and how our hero(ine) fits into what's going on decades later.

These are rich reads by James Alan Gardner and I'm going to reread the whole (seven book) series in another year or so, I'm sure.

I recommend, for a more literal take on the theme, a non-fiction book I read several years ago. Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before by Tony Horwitz.

And of course my favorite author, Michael Perry, writes wonderful books of self-discovery through investigation and exploration. Perhaps the one to point to here is one of his most recent, Montaigne in Barn Boots: An Amateur Ambles Through Philosophy.