Books like Stalking The Wild Asparagus — picked by fans

We value this book because it is alone in giving equal weight to the foraging (for eating) and medicinal values (for health) of thirteen super-abundant survival plants.

We love its breezy but informed tone, its original recipes, and its underlying serious ecological purpose. What we found somewhat irritating was the twee little verses that introduce each plant: these are groan-worthy! But that’s the only and slight criticism, and we love to follow Katrina for fun and very well-informed foraging!

This book is our go-to reference for any new wild food plant and still our favourite food foraging book of all, even though it’s over 40 years old. It has the best photographs (often of the author’s amazingly set-up food shots), the biggest range of worldwide edible wild plant foods (including mushrooms and seaweed), and the most informed, comprehensive text.

It is the book all foragers aspire to have written and we are very grateful to Roger for having done it so well already!

We think this is Matthew’s masterwork, forming the most thorough and sensitive contemporary herbal in English. When we say ‘sensitive’ we are referencing Matthew’s intuitive understanding of a herb’s specific qualities, or virtues.

He combines this feeling for a plant’s individuality with a thorough knowledge of the way it has been favoured in traditional herbal medicine and how he has used it himself, quoting from cases arising in his long clinical experience. A proponent of ‘drop dosing’ or using the least amount of herb necessary, he is often surprising, sometimes controversial, but always well-informed and elegant in his work.

We admire this new book by the acknowledged expert on North American edible plants. Sam Thayer’s astonishing field guide is handy in size, a laminated paperback with lovely rounded corners, full of beautiful illustrations and maps, covering most of eastern North America and including over 700 edible plant species.

It is superb on botanical, medicinal and culinary dimensions, and is also fun. How can you resist an author who offers both a ‘regular old boring index’ and ‘the best index (in the author’s opinion)’, which lists, for example, the best herbs to make teas, string or wild spices, the best-kept foraging secrets and the best things to avoid feeding a first date?

Putting a wild plant into one’s mouth must be preceded by positive identification. This book’s text and photos offer guidance and recipes. It doesn’t try to cover a huge number of plant species, but the plants that are included are covered in more detail than in most plant books. The introduction alone, in my opinion, is worth the price of this book.

I love the way there is a mystery within a mystery. A group of actors is staging a play for the benefit of the passengers on a transcontinental train trip across Canada. The protagonist, who is undercover and posing as a waiter, befriends the lead actor and takes a page out of Hamlet, using the play to pressure the villain into making a mistake and incriminating himself. Accurate details about working as a waiter lend a sense of ‘David versus Goliath’ to the storyline.

She really gets at the heart of how Brown and Black bodies are seen, and what is fascinating to me is the approach through current “technical art” and a good discussion of architecture. I had a class focus on her discussion—lengthy—about surveillance and race. It’s extremely poignant, and something whites especially just don’t think about. I will never again go through an airport without thinking about her book. 

Now that’s a question that can be answered in a few sentences. Here’s goes…

This is among the finest examples of the true-crime genre. It’s an enthralling, pacey, and ingeniously structured account of the murders committed on both sides of the Atlantic by Dr. Neill Cream, a Scottish-born Canadian whose medical career served as camouflage for his psychopathic misogyny.

Macabre though the subject matter is, Jobb never wallows in that side of things, preferring to use the story as a vehicle for his vivid and insightful portrait of late nineteenth-century society.

You’re fifteen years old, living unhappily with your feckless parents and unstable older sister in a small town in Montana. And then your family implodes: your parents are arrested for bank robbery and your sister flees to parts unknown. As troubling as the premise is, Canada becomes even darker and more ominous as young Dell Parsons travels alone to Saskatchewan to live with erstwhile family friends, but in fact enters a whole new world of intrigue and violence. Dell is a stoic character, and you desperately want to see his life take a turn for the better. What you get instead is a case study in resiliency and survival. Ford’s prose is powerful; every word counts, every sentence pulls you deeper into the story.

We all need rock stars to idolize, and mine is Alice Munro, a Canadian writer whose books are mostly short story collections about the quietly intense lives of farmers and townspeople in rural Canada.

I’m from a generation of writers who learned about writing through the stories of Alice Munro, Anton Chekhov, and Raymond Carver, among others. Choosing my favorite Munro book is a challenge—for decades I read them all over and over—but if I had to, I’d say it’s Dance of the Happy Shades.

No one understands better what it’s like to be an adolescent girl than Alice Munro, and no one is more gifted at portraying it, particularly in the stories “An Ounce of Cure” and “Red Dress—1946,” with such generous characterizations and courageous honesty.