This book was surprisingly good. It's another one of those "year of doing X" memoir books, and follows the same style -- a chapter for each aspect of the year-long challenge, snappy editing, lightly humorous, would make a good audiobook. In this case, the author, who grew up Canadian Baptist, felt like his spiritual life had grown dull and wanted to focus on learning the secrets of Christian prayer.

A lot of the author's adventures seemed rather last-minute "let's wing it and see what happens" and so multiple times I thought that he missed out on giving important and meaningful context to certain rituals and traditions. But I did like that each chapter had a good takeaway or prayer tradition that you could try out in your own faith practice. In fact, just this morning I tried Pope Francis's five-finger prayer method, which was quite easy to remember and helped me focus while I was commuting and praying at the same time (easier said than done).

In spite of talking with and experimenting so many different flavors of the Christian faith, the author stays quite rigid with his personal theology (which is fine, but he notes when he disagrees with certain aspects of other people's beliefs). Showing his own spiritual progression throughout the year isn't really the focus. At the end, he writes that his prayer life is much more active than before, and that he has built a sort of road-map for where he would like his praying abilities to develop, but as a reader I didn't get a sense of spiritual development along the way.

Anyways, it was a fun, light read, I took a lot of notes to do more research later. And I think it would be a good book to read with someone high school or college age.