Episode 211: Nature

Introduction

Welcome, everyone, to Reading with Libraries! This week we are discussing nature books, and all the fun of seeing the outside world.

We are a multitype system, supporting all types of libraries. This is our book group podcast, where we discuss different genres of books each week, while we all sit in our comfy chairs and drink our beverages. You are, of course, an important part of this book group. So if you do not already have a nice beverage please go get one, so you can join the experience.

There are no “right” or “wrong” books to read and chat about for our book group – we are just here to explore all kinds of books. All of us will take away at least a title or two that we want to read at the end of our time together!

This week we welcome Guest Host Kathy Parker from St John’s and St Ben’s college libraries!

 

Beverages

We have guests, we have our genre. We just need our beverages. Fortunately, we all came prepared with something to sip while we talk about our books. Each week we like to connect the theme of our books with our beverages. Each beverage will have a recipe or a link on our episode page, so you can try them yourself!  Obviously, feel free to sip along with us with any beverage that is right for you. Just join us in celebrating books, and discussing books!

 

Frozen Hibiscus Margaritas 

For this recipe I used my ice cream machine to get these margaritas nice and icy. I hate when margaritas are watered down, which is why I hate adding regular ice cubes. When you use this method, your margarita can also double as a dessert. After about 15-20 minutes in the ice cream machine, the mixture is the perfect consistency for a great margarita.

  • 1 cup water
  • 2 tsp dried hibiscus flowers
  • 1 vanilla bean, split
  • ½ cup sugar
  • Zest and juice of 3 limes
  • Juice of 1 orange
  • ½ cup tequila

Place hibiscus flowers and vanilla bean in a saucepan with the cup of water and bring to a boil. After water is boiling remove from heat, cover, and let sit for 20 minutes. Strain mixture to remove hibiscus flowers and vanilla bean. Add mixture back to pan and add sugar. Simmer for about 5 minutes until sugar is dissolved.  Remove from heat and add lime zest, lime juice, orange juice, and tequila. Chill mixture until it has cooled completely.

Once mixture is cool, place in your ice cream machine and process according to manufacturers instructions. After about 20 minutes, mixture is ready to serve. You can also freeze and serve as sorbet.

 

SUMMER’S GARDEN

For those who don’t know, rose geranium is a rose-scented herb that has a very distinct floral aroma. Seriously, you can smell it from a mile away.

  • 5 Blackberries
  • .5 oz. Rose Geranium Syrup*
  • .25 oz. Lemon Juice
  • 5 oz. Gin

In a pint glass, muddle blackberries with Rose Geranium Syrup and lemon juice. Fill the glass with ice, add gin, and shake well. Strain into rocks glass over fresh ice.

*Simple syrup (equal parts sugar and water, heated) infused with rose geranium.

 

 

Golden Jasmine Martini

  • 1 heaped teaspoon jasmine green tea
  • boiling water
  • 3 or 4 ice cubes
  • 2 measures vodka (or gin) be as generous as you’re feeling, about 100 ml should do it
  • 1 tbsp 15 ml sugar syrup or honey
  • jasmine flowers to garnish

Put your martini glasses in the freezer to chill for as long as you can. Half an hour is good.

Make a cup of jasmine tea with boiling water and leave it to steep for a few minutes. Add the honey or sugar syrup and stir to dissolve it.

Put the ice cubes in a cocktail shaker and pour the tea, through a strainer (to catch any tea leaves) into the shaker and add the vodka or gin. Shake well until ice-cold and strain into the frozen glasses. Garnish with jasmine petals and enjoy.

 


Lavender Bee’s Knees

This prohibition-era classic has bright, crisp flavors, and often billed as the gin drink for the non-gin drinker.

INGREDIENTS

Lavender Honey Syrup

INSTRUCTIONS

  1. Combine all ingredients in a shaker full of ice. Shake vigorously for 10 full seconds. Double strain into a cocktail glass and garnish with a lavender sprig.

 

 

Genre Suggestions

This is such a fun topic, partly because it is so very broad! You can find all kinds of books in here, from hard sciences, to travelogues, to gardening. Animals, flowers, backyards, mountains – it can all be included as part of the nature genre. This may make it easier to find a book you like, as there are tons of potential choices; but of course so many choices can make decisions harder! (Check out our other podcast, Linking Our Libraries for our episode on Decision Making for some ideas.)

In many libraries, especially public libraries, the gardening section is very popular; and it can be a challenge to keep them on the shelves long enough for people who want them to find them. In school libraries, the books with cool pictures of insects are always popular with kids who use them in writing reports for science classes. In academic libraries we might find books with specialized information about the biology of animals. In medical libraries, we can find books on the anatomy of plants, especially those that are potentially helpful or dangerous to us.

Numerous studies are showing the value of being in nature, as our lives increasingly retreat inside and we spend our days staring at screens. Take a walk 20 minutes a day and potentially see blood pressure drop, anxiety and depression levels drop, and an increased sense of calm in your day. Japanese doctors began prescribing Forest Bathing for people, and it’s spreading to the US.

In 2011 Richard Louv wrote The Nature Principle: Human Restoration and the End of Nature-Deficit Disorder, and started a conversation about the problems that occur when we spend too much time indoors. He said there are three reasons people, especially kids, are not spending nearly enough time outside in nature:

  • Unrealistic fears of danger
  • Loss of nature around you, as more people live in urban environments (especially those without sidewalks or other design elements that discourage walking and encourage driving cars for even short trips)
  • Increasing amount of fun things to do inside, including TV, movies, and video games

This has lead to a whole host of physical and mental problems, which may be helped by deliberately spending time outside, looking at nature, animals, ocean waves, or things growing. At least, put some plants in your home or office so you have some nature inside with you!

Some places you can go to find suggestions in this area:

Now that we have some good resources to help us all find more books, let’s share some of the books we have already enjoyed!

 

Books Discussed

Read some good books with us!

  • Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, by Terry Tempest Williams
  • Lab Girl, by Hope Jahren
  • Listening to Whales: What the Orcas have Taught Us, by Alexandra Morton
  • Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, by Camille Dungy
  • Winter Friends, by Carl Sams and Jean Stoick
  • Tucked Under: Growing Up int Northern Minnesota, by Carol Bowman

 

Here are some other books we shared, with descriptions from Amazon:

Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout by Philip Connors

A decade ago Philip Connors left work as an editor at the Wall Street Journal and talked his way into a job far from the streets of lower Manhattan: working as one of the last fire lookouts in America. Spending nearly half the year in a 7′ x 7′ tower, 10,000 feet above sea level in remote New Mexico, his tasks were simple: keep watch over one of the most fire-prone forests in the country and sound the alarm at the first sign of smoke.

Fire Season is Connors’s remarkable reflection on work, our place in the wild, and the charms of solitude. The landscape over which he keeps watch is rugged and roadless — it was the first region in the world to be officially placed off limits to industrial machines — and it typically gets hit by lightning more than 30,000 times per year. Connors recounts his days and nights in this forbidding land, untethered from the comforts of modern life: the eerie pleasure of being alone in his glass-walled perch with only his dog Alice for company; occasional visits from smokejumpers and long-distance hikers; the strange dance of communion and wariness with bears, elk, and other wild creatures; trips to visit the hidden graves of buffalo soldiers slain during the Apache wars of the nineteenth century; and always the majesty and might of lightning storms and untamed fire.

 

 

The Mushroom Hunters: On the Trail of Secrets, Eccentrics, and the American Dream by Langdon Cook

 Within the dark corners of America’s forests grow culinary treasures. Chefs pay top dollar to showcase these elusive and beguiling ingredients on their menus. Whether dressing up a filet mignon with smoky morels or shaving luxurious white truffles over pasta, the most elegant restaurants across the country now feature an abundance of wild mushrooms.

The mushroom hunters, by contrast, are a rough lot. They live in the wilderness and move with the seasons. Motivated by Gold Rush desires, they haul improbable quantities of fungi from the woods for cash. Langdon Cook embeds himself in this shadowy subculture, reporting from both rural fringes and big-city eateries with the flair of a novelist, uncovering along the way what might be the last gasp of frontier-style capitalism.

Rich with the science and lore of edible fungi—from seductive chanterelles to exotic porcini—The Mushroom Hunters is equal parts gonzo travelogue and culinary history lesson, a rollicking, character-driven tour through a world that is by turns secretive, dangerous, and tragically American.

 

 

Girl Hunter: Revolutionizing the Way We Eat, One Hunt at a Time by Georgia Pellegrini

What happens when a classically-trained New York chef and fearless omnivore heads out of the city and into the wild to track down the ingredients for her meals? After abandoning Wall Street to embrace her lifelong love of cooking, Georgia Pellegrini comes face to face with her first kill. From honoring that first turkey to realizing that the only way we truly know where our meat comes from is if we hunt it ourselves, Pellegrini embarks on a wild ride into the real world of local, organic, and sustainable food. Teaming up with veteran hunters, she trav­els over field and stream in search of the main course—from quail to venison and wild boar, from elk to javelina and squirrel. Pellegrini’s road trip careens from the back of an ATV chasing wild hogs along the banks of the Mississippi to a dove hunt with beer and barbeque, to the birthplace of the Delta Blues. Along the way, she meets an array of unexpected characters—from the Commish, a venerated lifelong hunter, to the lawyer-by day, duck-hunting-Bayou-philosopher at dawn—who offer surprising lessons about food and life. Pellegrini also discovers the dangerous underbelly of hunting when an outing turns illegal—and dangerous. More than a food-laden hunting narrative, Girl Hunter also teaches you how to be a self-sufficient eater. Each chapter offers recipes for finger-licking dishes

 

 

Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness  by Nathanael Johnson

No matter where we live—city, country, oceanside, ormountains—there are wonders that we walk past every day. Unseen City widens the pinhole of our perspective by allowing us to view the world from the high-altitude eyes of a turkey vulture and the distinctly low-altitude eyes of a snail. The narrative allows us to eavesdrop on the comically frenetic life of a squirrel and peer deep into the past with a ginkgo biloba tree. Each of these organisms has something unique to tell us about our neighborhoods and, chapter by chapter, Unseen City takes us on a journey that is part nature lesson and part love letter to the world’s urban jungles. With the right perspective, a walk to the subway can be every bit as entrancing as a walk through a national park. (less)

 

 

The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring  by Richard Preston

Hidden away in foggy, uncharted rain forest valleys in Northern California are the largest and tallest organisms the world has ever sustained–the coast redwood trees, Sequoia sempervirens. Ninety-six percent of the ancient redwood forests have been destroyed by logging, but the untouched fragments that remain are among the great wonders of nature. The biggest redwoods have trunks up to thirty feet wide and can rise more than thirty-five stories above the ground, forming cathedral-like structures in the air. Until recently, redwoods were thought to be virtually impossible to ascend, and the canopy at the tops of these majestic trees was undiscovered. In The Wild Trees, Richard Preston unfolds the spellbinding story of Steve Sillett, Marie Antoine, and the tiny group of daring botanists and amateur naturalists that found a lost world above California, a world that is dangerous, hauntingly beautiful, and unexplored.

The canopy voyagers are young–just college students when they start their quest–and they share a passion for these trees, persevering in spite of sometimes crushing personal obstacles and failings. They take big risks, they ignore common wisdom (such as the notion that there’s nothing left to discover in North America), and they even make love in hammocks stretched between branches three hundred feet in the air.

The deep redwood canopy is a vertical Eden filled with mosses, lichens, spotted salamanders, hanging gardens of ferns, and thickets of huckleberry bushes, all growing out of massive trunk systems that have fused and formed flying buttresses, sometimes carved into blackened chambers, hollowed out by fire, called “fire caves.” Thick layers of soil sitting on limbs harbor animal and plant life that is unknown to science. Humans move through the deep canopy suspended on ropes, far out of sight of the ground, knowing that the price of a small mistake can be a plunge to one’s death.

 

Conclusion

Thank you so much for joining us this week! We will be back next week with a new genre, new books, new beverages, and all new discussion! Subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app, so you don’t miss a single moment of this book group!

If you want more info on our other work, check out our library and nonprofit training podcast: Linking Our Libraries.

We are looking forward to talking about books with you again next week!