Recommended Reads Books (List)

From the brightly colored pebbles of Lake McDonald in Montana’s Glacier National Park to the regal granite cliffs of El Capitan and Half Dome in California’s Yosemite Valley, the US National Parks contain some of the most recognizable and iconic natural landmarks in the world. Capture the majesty each national park offers with original beanie patterns created by knitting designer and outdoor enthusiast Nancy Bates.

Beanies range from simple beanie constructions to more challenging stitch patterns such as the two-color crossovers inspired by South Dakota’s Badlands or the multiple cable designs inspired by New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns. Clear charts, easy-to-read keys, and thorough instructions help any knitter, whether beginner or experienced, through these gratifying projects. Show your love and appreciation of our national parks with these beautiful and practical beanie projects you can wear any time or any place.

A Beginner's Guide to Colored Pencil Drawing provides instructions for creating brilliantly realistic drawings featuring rich shadows, bright highlights, smooth gradients, and glowing colors. Learn at your own pace over the course of 14 easy-to-follow lessons!

This complete all-in-one guide starts with the basics - drawing lines, adding colors, drawing shapes and creating gradations. Then, it provides a series of detailed lessons teaching you how to draw colorful, everyday objects, such as:

• Food items like burgers, breakfasts, cookies, pickles, tarts, melons, apples, asparagus, and cocktails
• Flowers & plants such as hydrangeas, succulents, roses, and carnations
• Household items like silverware, bottles, toys, handkerchiefs, gemstones, and dolls
• A variety of animals including parakeets, kittens, and dogs

Each lesson includes blank sketch of the subject so you can focus on coloring techniques, and Faber-Castell color codes are provided so you can faithfully reproduce the example illustrations. Each lesson also includes a tear-out practice sheet with the full sketch so you can dive right in and try your hand at rendering these objects yourself! The practice template sheets are also available online to download and print at home.

There's something about birds that fascinates people and invites us to pause, look and listen to the beautiful, natural world around us. But do you always recognize what you see and hear? With this book, you'll get started. Birding for the Curious is a beginner course in birding for every nature and animal lover out there. With it, you'll learn what birding is all about, what birders do and how you can become one. You'll also learn how to find more birds, identify the birds you see, and attract more birds to your yard and feeders. 

Yoga practice has so much to offer us physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. But many of us feel discouraged to practice because we see young, slim, flexible, well, and able-bodied people dominating yoga spaces. Yet, yoga is truly a practice for all - conferring enormous benefits to our overall well-being as our bodies change, age, and navigate various health challenges.

Jivana Heyman, founder of Accessible Yoga, views yoga as a basic human right - saying we all deserve to practice it in whatever state we find our body or mind. Accessible Yoga offers a simple, clear, and wonderfully adaptable practice for all people regardless of ability, health, and body type. Heyman has spent over twenty years sharing yoga with people of all abilities and backgrounds, and in this book, he shares his knowledge by breaking down complex yoga poses, breathing practices, meditation techniques, and yoga teachings into clearly understandable and practical tools we can use every day, regardless of our limitations or challenges.

In this approachable cookbook, Rahanna Bisseret Martinez shares how to make food from around the world that respects the earth, workers, and consumers. A college freshman who has already cooked in the finest restaurants, she serves up lessons, tips, and tricks she has learned since her culinary career began at age thirteen, including techniques for everything from roasting and stir frying to pickling and infusing. The desserts and drinks chapters are perfect for hosting and making everyday meals special. Flavor+Us is filled with stories from Rahanna's experiences learning to cook in her family’s Californian kitchen, her time competing on Top Chef Junior, and the restaurants where she learned what cooking in community means.

This book combines Chinese painting techniques with twenty-four solar terms of traditional Chinese culture. According to the sequence of the four seasons - spring, summer, autumn, and winter - natural scenes are refined into a series of charming ink paintings. Following the tutorials in this book, you can complete beautiful ink and wash paintings in just a few strokes.

In this book:

*Starting with the most basic knowledge, you will gain an understanding of the classification and characteristics of the brush, ink, paper, inkstone, and pigment.

*You can gradually move from superficial to deeper techniques as they are integrated into the tutorials, including a total of more than 30 painting techniques that can be easily learned through practice.

*Follow meticulous graphic steps and intimate key tips to complete 24 fine ink paintings with rich themes centered around flowers, birds, vegetables and fruits, fish and insects, and landscapes.

*Gain inspiration to integrate these paintings into life and turn them into practical items which can be used to decorate your home or as gifts.

*Easily copied images and the spine binding design make it easy to spread the book evenly as you practice.

Experience the joys of literature with this compulsively readable, deeply engaging discussion of great short novels. A journey into fiction designed with our contemporary attention spans in mind, Great Short Books suggests fifty-eight excellent short novels, all under 200 pages - easily readable in a week or less - a fresh approach to a fun, fascinating year of reading.

From hard-boiled fiction to magical realism, the 18th century to the present day, Great Short Books spans genres, cultures, countries, and time to present an enchanting and diverse selection of acclaimed and canonical novels. From works in translation like Yu Miri’s Tokyo Ueno Station and Marguerite Duras’s The Lover to popular, acclaimed authors like Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, this compilation is a celebration of classics from the historic to contemporary - plus a few bestsellers, including Stephen King and Colson Whitehead. Each entry includes the novel’s opening lines, a spoiler-free plot summary, a “why you should read it” section, and suggestions for what to read next.

This is origami at its most simple and elegant. With a special focus on a very visual method of explanation, this collection brings together 50 traditional origami projects, accessible to experts and beginners alike. The folds are organized from the simplest to the most complex.

The projects range from sea lions to spinning tops, Christmas decorations and colorful flowers, to sailboats. Detailed illustrations show you exactly where to place your hands at every step of the process, and projects are given a difficulty rating for ease of reference. Simply follow the diagrams and watch origami creations of all kinds come to life at your fingertips.

Crochet a garden of kawaii happiness with this super-cute collection of 40 amigurumi patterns!

Let Melissa Bradley of Yarn Blossom Boutique lead you down the garden path to discover a colorful world of crochet flowers, plants, and garden creatures with this blooming marvellous book. Plants and flowers make everyone smile, but never more so than when they are made out of crochet with sweet little faces. This adorable collection of patterns will fill your world with everlasting flowers, without having to do any digging whatsoever.

Cultivate your color knowledge and a bumper crop of makes, perfect to bring the outdoors in and to give as gifts. As well as the patterns, Melissa shares all the know-how on the simple crochet techniques required for everything to come up roses. Alongside the flowers and plants, you'll spot cute bugs and gardening tools, brought to life kawaii-style, to create the ultimate garden-lovers collection.

How to Embroider Almost Every Cute Thing includes 550 supercute, sweet, and little embroidery motifs for just about everything you could ever want to depict with needle and thread.

From cheeseburgers and chihuahuas to earmuffs and exercise equipment, among the many charming motifs are flowers, food, animals, clothing, vehicles, sports and hobbies, letters, numbers, and decorative designs from Japan’s leading embroidery artists. Use the motifs to embellish t-shirts, socks, bags, table linens, and more!

What you’ll find inside:

• Finished stitched examples, stitch guides, and templates for all the motifs
• Essential step-by-step tutorials for key stitches and techniques

Imagine this: In the morning, you pluck a few mint leaves from your backdoor herb garden and add them to your tea. A few hours later, you step out onto your patio and collect a handful of lettuce leaves for your lunch salad. Just before dinner, you harvest a few basil leaves and cherry tomatoes for a delicious caprese pasta.

In her trademark warm and informative style, bestselling author and expert gardener Maggie Stuckey shares everything you need to know to succeed with container gardening: planning, gearing up, planting, nurturing, and harvesting.

In The Container Victory Garden, you will find:

• detailed line art drawings that illustrate many gardening techniques and set-ups
• first-person stories of World War II Victory Gardens and their inspiration for today's gardeners
• beautiful full-color paintings of diverse people enjoying their container gardens

This is the promise of container gardening: a fresh bounty of vegetables, herbs, and edible flowers you can enjoy in every season.

Ever look up at the sky and say, "Wow!"? This volume shares everything you need to know to photograph and postprocess images of the night sky with standard DSLR and mirrorless camera equipment, such as the moon, eclipses, the Milky Way, star fields, star trails, comets, and meteor showers. 

A complete list of the equipment you will need shows that you probably already have all or most of what is recommended, as this book is for photography with your standard camera, lenses, and tripod, not telescopes and tracking tripods. Lots of illustrations with complete technical information will help you plan your exact strategy!

Discover a trove of upcycling ideas and inspiration, with this collection of projects from upcycling influencer Emma Foss. She shares detailed, step-by-step tutorials to teach you essential upcycling techniques so you can create something out of nothing. Through these creative projects, you’ll develop skills in basic woodworking, reupholstery, painting, papier-mâché and so much more. Best of all, these projects use materials you’re likely to already have lying around the house or can be found cheaply at thrift stores!

This astounding collection of projects is perfect for any DIY enthusiast, or anyone with a knack for using the materials they have to make something unique and memorable. Turn thrift-store jeans into a unique painted masterpiece, transform a paint palette into a functional clock or even hand-make your own recycled paper. It’s up to you!

Build More Stuff with Wood is a follow-up book to Build Stuff with Wood (2017), the first book in the Build Stuff series, which showed beginner woodworkers how to make a great assortment of woodworking projects with a handful of small, portable power tools like a circular saw, drill, and router.

This second book in the series adds a couple of essential machines and hand tools, building a bridge to fine woodworking. The new tools include a tablesaw, a 14-in. bandsaw, and a benchtop drill press, which are among the first machines most woodworkers buy, as well as two essential hand tools: a block plane and a chisel set. The tools and new skills offer a host of essential joinery techniques and powerful design possibilities.

Unlike most other vegetable gardening books on the market, this one approaches the subject through the lens of what you can grow during each of the four seasons, even if you live in a cold climate. Using season-extension techniques, such as cold frames, mini hoop houses, and thick mulches, combined with a thoughtful mixture of annual and perennial crops, you’ll discover that eating from your backyard through all 12 months is possible.

With a hearty dose of enthusiasm and expertise, author Misilla dela Llana of YouTube’s Learn to Grow channel presents this season-by-season guide to growing edible plants, covering everything from what tasks and what crops are best for each harvesting season to step-by-step DIY projects for structures and methods to temper weather extremes. With Four-Season Food Gardening you can keep on growing, no matter what challenges Mother Nature presents.

Blousy blooms, speckled branches, rich foliage and delicate petals; nature has the power to inspire and energize, calm and soothe, focus and still. Anna has harnessed this magic with 26 tailor-made combinations of flowers to bring a floral boost to your home, no matter what your mood. With easy-to-find seasonal blooms, found items such as twigs and dried fruit, and any assortment of containers, discover how simple it is to bring a little bit of nature’s mystery into the everyday. 

Start doing your own household repairs and simple renovations without the expense of calling in a professional! If you are frustrated by your own inability to handle a repair, or resentful of having to pay someone to take care of simple home maintenance - you’ve come to the right place. Full of expert advice, this practical handbook features easy instructions for all the home DIY basics, from painting and wallpapering to simple plumbing, changing a lock, using power tools, fixing a squeaky board and much more. Beginner's Guide to DIY will provide first-time homeowners and renters with the basic skills and guidance to get the job done. This ultimate reference guide for the DIY novice offers help for anyone who has a busy working life but still wants to make their home look good - without spending a fortune.

For the past thirty years, Deepak Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution in the West. Total Meditation offers a complete exploration and reinterpretation of the physical, mental, emotional, relational, and spiritual benefits that this practice can bring. Deepak guides readers on how to wake up to new levels of awareness that will ultimately cultivate a clear vision, heal suffering in your mind and body, and help recover who you really are. Readers will undergo a transformative process, which will result in an awakening of the body, mind, and spirit that will allow you to live in a state of open, free, creative, and blissful awareness twenty-four hours a day.

With this book, Deepak elevates the practice of meditation to a life-changing quest for higher consciousness and a more fulfilling existence. He also incorporates new research on meditation and its benefits, provides practical awareness exercises, and concludes with a 52-week program of meditations to help revolutionize every aspect of your life.

Kick your crafting up a notch with incredible handmade woodburnings! Whether you want to combine inspirational hand lettering with alpine charm in the Mountain Scene woodburning or complement your farmhouse aesthetic with one-of-a-kind Deer Silhouette Wall Décor, the art of pyrography is an easy, enjoyable way to fill your home with custom art.

Aney Carver is the founder of Pyrocrafters, and in this book she shows you exactly how simple this impressive craft is. With just a wood canvas and a woodburning tool easily found at craft stores, you can make anything you can imagine! Each easy-to-follow project provides a traceable design template, then walks you through essential techniques like outlining and shading.

With a variety of pieces like the darling Keepsake Box with Ink and the majestic Eagle Eye portrait, you can hone your pyrography skills as you create your own wonderful woodburnings. So grab your canvas and woodburning tool, because it’s time to play with fire.