Chris’s Hadfield book, An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, was on my wishlist for a long time, and I finally bought it when I had a long wait at the airport. This is a great book to read on a plane: you can look out the window and understand why people are obsessed with space exploration.

When Chris was at the ISS for 6 months, his twitter account became really popular for the great photos he was sharing, showing the intricate details of deserts, oceans, hurricanes… I love looking out the window from a plane, seeing little villages above the clouds in Slovenia, the Andes cutting through Chile, the dryness of Morocco.

His book tells the amazing story of how he went from dreaming of being an astronaut when he was 9, to actually going to space many years later. It includes lots of fun tales about the ins and outs of being an astronaut, but it is also a book about achieving goals and being focussed (which is exactly my kind of thing). It is the perfect read for a holiday – you’ll come back wanting to do more and more!

Listen: Chris Hadfield’s rendition of Space Oddity has millions of hits of youtube and is just great!