A bicycle ride round the top of the Xian city wall, a recipe for soup from nothing and stray snatches of conversation between an imaginary student and a forest dweller. Irwin Allan Sealy’s The Small Wild Goose Pagoda lives up to its ‘almanacity’. At its heart, the book is a mix of memoir and building manual set mostly in the author’s home in Dehradun. After a visit to Xian, Sealy was inspired to build himself a smaller version of Hiuen Tsang’s Wild Goose Pagoda, sky well and all.