I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times book review, and this is the book review podcast.

The beginning of a new year often inspires a bit of reflection, as we think about how best to use the 12 months that stretch out ahead of us.

An essential for true reflection, I think, is some quiet, something that is increasingly

hard to find in our world. Pico Iyer has been able to find it. For decades now, the travel

writer and essayist has made time to travel to a small monastery in

Northern California in search of solitude. He writes about those retreats in his new book,

A Flame, Learning from Silence. Pico joins us this week to talk about his journeys, which

he started making decades ago after his house burned down in a California wildfire.

Pico, welcome to the book review podcast.

Thank you, Gilbert. I'm so very pleased to be here.

It's particularly interesting to talk to you about it this week, about your book.

It's called a flame. Given the absolutely terrible things that we're seeing right now in Los Angeles.

One of the initial impetus is for you spending time at the new Camaldalee Hermitage was a fire.

I'd love it if you could tell us that story.

Yes, so 34 years ago, I was in my family

home in the hills of California, and I went upstairs to find our house was completely encircled

by 70-foot flames. So I grabbed my mother's cat. I jumped into a car. We drove down our narrow

mountain driveway, and we saw we couldn't move up

and we couldn't drive down. The smoke was so intense we could hear helicopters above, but we

couldn't see them, they couldn't see us, and the fire was so thick that no fire truck could get

up to us. And so, really, we were saved only by a Good Samaritan who had been driving along the freeway

with a water truck, saw a fire in the hills, raced up to be of help, and got stranded by chance

...