There's a fresh lot of new books out, some to help you enjoy summer activities, others just for your reading enjoyment.
If you're staying home to watch your garden grow, these books should help you along:
Growing Food in a Short Season: Sustainable, Organic Cold-Climate Gardening by Melanie J. Watts (Douglas & McIntyre): While this book is aimed at shorter seasons than we enjoy on B.C.'s coast, the author's experience, suggestions and gardening hints will be of interest to any gardener. Illustrated, including suggestions and recipes for using the fruits and vegetables covered in the text.
The Book of Kale and Friends: 14 Easy to Grow Superfoods, by Sharon Hanna & Carol Pope (Douglas & McIntyre): Just the thing for the back yard gardener who has decided to grow kale for health, beauty and longevity. It's also full of useful information about gardening in general, as well as growing useful herbs. Plants and recipes are illustrated with bright, colourful photographs.
Heart and Soil: The Revolutionary Good of Gardens by Des Kennedy (Harbour Publishing): Kennedy's short essays on gardening, its trials, revelations, beauty and hard work, are both entertaining and informative. Ranging from the largest trees to the smallest flowers, vegetable and shrubs, how to make a good sod roof, attack invasive ivy, discourage pests, even how to save the Prairies, this book gives you something of interest about it all.
When you're starting to harvest your bounty, you'll need some new recipes, as well as the ones in the gardening books, so try 100 Recipes From 100 Books, by Jean Pare (Company's Coming). This is a colourful, useful book of best recipes from the long-popular Company's Coming series. Great photos of each dish, easy-to-read format, and exciting but not too exotic ingredients. Varied selection of vegetarian main dishes, as well as a good variety of appetizer, mains, salads soups and desserts section.
For some time travel, read A Century in a Small Town: One Family's Stories, by Evelyn Sangster Benson (Westminster Publishing). A wonderfully nostalgic trip down one of our local memory lanes. Benson's stories of early New Westminster, her own and her parents and grandparents, are entertainingly written, full of interesting detail that will be familiar to those over 50, and a revelation to anyone younger.
For longer hikes, there's Off the Beaten Path: Hiking Guide to Vancouver's North Shore, by Norman D. Watt (Harbour Publishing): Watt's clear directions and maps make this a useful guide. He's also careful to note where you can park to start your hike, and how long the hike should take. He covers hikes of different levels of difficulty, and some of the photographs of views you'll see should inspire readers to don their hiking boots.
Be sure to take along A Field Guide to Medicinal Wild Plants of Canada, by Beverley Gray (Harbour Publishing), and A Field Guide to Edible Fruits and Berries of the Pacific Northwest, by Richard J. Hebda (Harbour Publishing). Two more in this great portable series by Harbour, their four-by-eight-inch, accordion-fold pages fit neatly into a pocket or a backpack, with hardly any weight, taking up little room. Each plant is well photographed, as well as a written description of where it can be found, what it's good for, with precautions and warnings. No hiker should be without these.
For reading enjoyment at home and at the beach, there's Sophie, In Shadow, by Eileen Kernaghan (Thistledown Press): An entertaining and intriguing novel that takes a young girl traumatized by her escape from the Titanic, into the completely different and mysterious world of India in the early part of the 20th century. There, rival factions plotting upheaval involve her in exciting and sometimes mystic adventures. This well-told, fast-moving story can be enjoyed by all ages.
Bonsai Love, by Diane Tucker (Harbour Publishing): Burnaby writer Diane Tucker's fourth book of poetry, full of everyday yet newly experienced images, conveys strong and universal emotions. Tucker's spare yet always sensual poetry seems to vibrate with her sense of fulfillment, loss and longing.
The Best of Adrian Raeside: A Treasury of B.C. Cartoons (Harbour Publishing): A good cartoon can always bring a smile or laugh, even after many years. Raeside has skewered many of B.C.'s idiosyncrasies and foibles in his entertaining drawings and captions. Short historical notes beneath some of them give readers the context.
Combining both history and personal feelings, is We Go Far Back in Time: The Letters of Earle Birney and Al Purdy, 1947-1987 edited by Nicholas Bradley (Harbour Publishing). Forty years of letters between two of Canada's well-known and respected poets are serialized, picked and chosen for this dense book. It can be read to follow the growth of Canadian poetic literature and publishing, or you can read it for the often juicy literary gossip about the Canada Council, or other authors and poets. Opinions on the work of a whole spectrum of Canadian poets and writers is interspersed with everyday events in the lives of these two dissimilar contemporaries, in their four decades of friendship.
Beyond Barbed Wire: Essays on the Internment of Italian Canadians (Guernica Editions): A little-known and little advertised part of the panicky state of our world at the beginnings of the Second World War that created the internment camps for Canadian citizens who came here for refuge from what had became enemy countries. Sometimes painful reading that may sometimes sound contemporary.
For the younger readers there's
Jeremy Stone, by Lesley Choyce (Red Deer Press): It's hard enough to move, go to a new school, and doubly hard if you're the only First Nations student. Then, getting involved with a girl who is convinced of spirits acting in her life, complicates a bad situation that Jeremy Stone has to find a way out of - and does.
The Widow Tree, by Nicole Lundrigan (Douglas & McIntyre): An exciting teenage mystery set in post-war, government-controlled, poor and ravaged Yugolavia, that involves finding an ancient Roman hoard, then the mysterious disappearance of a friend, and fear and threatening violence.
Red: A Haida Manga, by Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas (Douglas & McIntyre): A traditional Haida tale told in the Japanese form of Manga, which is similar to the style of the old comic books. The illustrations are bold and vigorous as they tell this epic story of theft and revenge.
Pay It Forward Kids: Small Acts, Big Change, by Nancy Runstedler (Fitzhenry & Whiteside): A book to inspire young people, not with preaching about helping others, but with stories of actual young people and how they found ways to help others. The ways they found are simple enough for anyone with energy and determination to follow. Illustrated with photos and graphics.
The Raven and the Loon, by Rachel and Sean Qitsualik-Tinsley, illus. by Kim Smith (Inhabit Media Inc.): An entertaining tale, with big, lively illustrations of an old legend telling why the raven is black, and the loon has flat feet. For ages four to six.
