Spring is here, and while the weather this week isn’t cooperating you can always pick up a good gardening book to jumpstart your gardening ambitions. A good one is the delightful “Our Life in Gardens,” (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux 2010 $15.00) by Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd. With illustrations by Vermont’s Bobbi Angell, Eck and Winterrowd write chapter after chapter of informative, humorous and loving tidbits on cyclamens, magnolias, chickens, forcing branches and countless other topics. Filled with great stories, such as the one about the chickens they kept in their Beacon Hill apartment, and which they lovingly bathed and dried with a hair dryer, to taking clippings of arborvitaes off Route 95 in New Jersey and to describing their colorful wash of candelabra primroses in their garden in Vermont, this is a book to read at your kitchen table and plan what your garden could truly become!

“The Lost City of Z” by David Grann (Vintage/Random House 2010 $15.95) Be aware that the first 50 or so pages of this book provide historical background on early exploration of the Amazon territory and Colonel Percy Fawcett, but stay with it for a thrilling ride through this wild, bug infested area of South America. This work of non-fiction goes back and forth between Fawcett’s journey in 1925 and David Grann’s in 2005, creating an epic story detailing the mystery surrounding the Amazonian jungle.  As described in Roosevelt’s story in “River of Doubt,” author Candice Millard writes “ The rain forest was not a garden of easy abundance, but precisely the opposite. Its quiet, shaded halls of leafy opulence were not a sanctuary, but rather the greatest natural battlefield anywhere on the planet, hosting an unremitting  and remorseless fight for survival that occupied every single one of its inhabitants, every minute of every day.”  Reading Grann’s book will be a wild, educating ride of danger, fascinating history, travel insights, maggots, deadly plants and masterful writing.

“The Girl Who Fell From the Sky” by Heidi W. Durrow (Algonguin/Workman 2010 $22.95) Heidi Durrow’s manuscript of this novel won Barbara Kingsolver’s Bellwether Prize for Fiction in 2008.  Beautifully written, this is the story of Rachel, who was born to a white Danish mother and a black G.I who are killed in a tragic accident.  Rachel is sent to live with her African American grandmother in a different city, in a black community where her pale skin is no help to where she should fit in.  Not white, not black Rachel wanders through wondering who she is and why the color of her skin is so important. As she describes one of her first days in the new school early in the novel, “There are fifteen black people in the class and seven white people.  And there’s me.  There’s another girl who sits in the back.  Her name is Carmen LaGuardia, and has hair like mine, my same color skin, and she counts as black. I don’t understand how, but she seems to know.”   

“Written on the Body” by Jeanette Winterson (Vintage/Random House 1994 $13.95) The first sentence of this original piece of literature is “Why is the measure of love loss?”  The narrator of unknown gender continues from this sentence to tell a story of love, sexuality and loss.  Beautifully written, I flowed along occasionally wondering whether the narrator was a man or a woman, or had a name.  You get to know the women better, Jacqueline and Louise. Jacqueline is the safe lover and Louise is the married beloved woman with a body where the lover has “flown the distance of your body from side to side of your ivory coast. I know the forests where I can rest and feed.  I have mapped you with my naked eye and stored you out of sight.  The millions of cells that make up your tissues are plotted on my retina.  Night flying I know exactly where I am.  Your body is my landing strip.”  A short provocative and seductive novel, I look forward to reading some of Winterson’s other novels.

“The Spare Room” by Helen Garner (Picador 2010 $14.00) Thomas Mann wrote “A man’s dying is more his survivor’s affair than his own” and Helen Garner must have read this quote before writing The Spare Room.  Two women have been friends for over fifteen years and one, Nicola, is dying of cancer.   Helen takes in Nicola in the last few weeks of life, offering her the spare room and making it as comfortable as possible. What kind of pillow would she like?  What kind of reading material should be next to the bed?  Nicola arrives much sicker than Helen knew, yet is still elegant and stoic, disallowing the disease that is destroying her body. Female friendships can be tender and complicated, but with a terminal illness in the mix, they are unrelenting in their brutal honesty and love.

“Eating Pomegranates” by Sarah Gabriel (Scribner 2010 $25.00) Here is a sneak preview of a remarkable memoir going on sale on March 9, 2010.  I couldn’t put this book down and found it following me around days after reading.  Sarah Gabriel is a British journalist in the prime of her life with a husband and two young girls. When she was eight her own mother died of breast cancer.  At the age of 44, two years older than when her own mother died, Sarah is diagnosed with breast cancer, a result of M18T, an inherited mutation on the BRAC1 gene.  In a full frontal assault, Sarah takes on this devastating disease that has killed so many women and so many of her matriarchal ancestors and finds herself in a world in which there are no clear answer, no simple cures and a brutal reality. Raw and beautifully honest, Sarah describes the anger of her daughters because she can’t get out of bed to cook with them, the unending love of her husband “R” and her wish for her own mother to take care of her. More than just a memoir, Sarah interweaves history, the myth of Persephone and Demeter and the longing of daughters for their mothers and mothers for their daughters.  Every woman should read this book whether they have a history of breast cancer or not.    

Besides being a longtime bibliophile, Annie Philbrick is co-owner of Bank Square Books. She likes to write her own "book blurbs" that she posts around the store and has agreed to send along some of her picks for us on a regular basis.

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