Page-turners for a winter indoors
Gift ideas with a focus on art, food and culture.
Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer (Milkweed Editions, 385 pages, $52.50): A beautiful gift edition of the bestseller, full of Indigenous wisdom about our relationship with Mother Earth. “Sweetgrass does not propagate by windblown seed, but by rhizomes … like a memory of something you once knew and want to find again.” A balm for our times.
Field Notes From an Unintentional Birder, Julia Zarankin (Douglas & McIntyre, 255 pages, $24.95): A lovely book about discovering the outdoors and developing an unexpected love for birding after a recent divorce. You could twin this with Feed the Birds by Chris Earley (Firefly, 296 pages, $29.95), a great guide on how to identify 196 bird species you might see around your backyard bird feeder — and how to attract them. Earley lives in Guelph and the book is endorsed by the Canadian Wildlife Federation.
Two Trees Make a Forest, Jessica J. Lee (Hamish Hamilton, 283 pages, $24.95): The winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, Lee writes a beautiful book exploring the connection between her family and the land, growing closer to her ancestral homeland of Taiwan along the way. A wonderful work of nature writing that touches on memoir, travel, history.
A Life on Our Planet, David Attenborough (Grand Central, 266 pages, $33): The legendary naturist, now 94, chronicles witnessing the decline of biodiversity, starting in 1937 when he was 11. He moves through to the future where we are “calling upon nature’s extraordinary resilience to help us brings its biodiversity back from the brink.” Powerful, realistic and hopeful.
Ice Walker, James Raffan (Simon & Schuster, 268 pages, $25): It’s one thing to see images of polar bears in stories about polar ice melting; it’s quite another to understand what they’re going through. Raffan takes a unique approach to engaging our empathy — and, by extension, our concern — by telling the story from the perspective of a polar bear called Nanu. A compelling mix of science and narrative.