35 books like Honey from a Weed

I am always grateful when a book introduces me to a place completely unknown to me. Janisse Ray’s gorgeous memoir does exactly that: southern Georgia's disappearing longleaf pine forests. Her introduction to this landscape is a gift to readers, who will yearn, as she does, for its regeneration after a century of exploitation.

Raised in a junkyard along a busy highway, this writer learned the land’s history through the stories of her parents and others; she learned the intricate ecology of the pines and their companion flora and fauna, almost lost to industry and greed. Lyrical and beautifully written, Ray’s evocations of complex plant communities linger in the mind long after you’ve finished the book.

As an avid reader of biography, I was thrilled to discover this brilliant saga of George Orwell’s life as a journalist and activist and the rose bushes he purchased from Woolworths and planted in 1936 in an English garden.

The roses are a tangible presence in his participation in the Spanish Civil War and his support for women’s suffrage, universal justice, and human rights. I deeply admire how Solnit follows Orwell’s influence as a gardener and a humanist through a world hungry for his integrity and clarity of thought.

Nancy Turner is a renowned ethnobotanist whose work I have followed with excitement and pleasure my entire adult life. I am fascinated by her gathering, through good relations with the Haida people, a huge compendium of detailed information on the medicinal, technical, artistic and spiritual resources of people who’ve lived on a group of islands off B.C.’s northern coast since time immemorial.

It’s hard to imagine a better guide to a place than a book like this, which takes us deeply into a culture and its plants. Hats woven of spruce root, halibut hooks carved of yew, feast dishes filled with wild rhubarb and potatoes: I am dazzled by this book.

I learned about botanical nomenclature as a 19-year-old, and it opened a world to me, a place where plants told me something about their origins and their function. This book gives me the background to the long history of naming.

Those who gathered plants, who learned their uses and needed to be accurate, also required a system that would allow them to write about their knowledge in a way that allowed others to use it and share it. From Aristotle’s pupil Theophrastus in 4th century BE Athens to Islamic scholars to the 18th-century medical professor Carl Linnaeus, Anna Pavord immerses us in the search for meaning and sense in the world of plants.

It isn’t, not at all. It’s history at its best, populated by apothecaries, artists, botanists and scholars. And the illustrations are sublime.

The fact that the recipes in this book are authentic Mediterranean home cooking doesn’t mean they don’t stand up to almost any dinner party. Whether you’re putting on a sit-down dinner or a festive buffet, the sides, mains, and snacks from this cookbook are fresh and flavorful enough to hold their own. I add a salad, small plate recipe, side dish, or skewer from this book to many dinner parties. The recipes mix well with menu items from other flavor profiles. I love that there is a generous amount of bread recipes that are simple and approachable. They are perfect additions to any meal where you want your guests to feel at home and comfortable. 

I love this cookbook for how it makes me feel. It’s filled with authentic recipes from Sardinia (An island between Europe and Africa) that are presented like a poem to touch your soul and invite you to sit at a table that makes you feel warm, cozy, and welcomed.

The book contains various recipes for any occasion, and stunning images and engaging stories make it something beyond an ordinary cookbook!

Every time I’m in Sicily, I stuff my face.

The food is as sublime as the island itself. Imagine eating pasta alla norma (noodles with eggplant marinara) with a breathtaking view of Mt. Etna. There’s fried arancini filled with rice, there’s caponata, there’s orange cake... I could go on and on! The Sicily Cookbook has recipes for some of my favorite Sicilian foods plus stunning photos of the island.

It's food and travel combined!

Vegan cooking never looked so appealing to me before reading this book. I’m not vegan, but I love to eat hearty, delicious vegan food if I get my hands on it, and this book is filled with many!

The stories behind how she decided to write the book and the tasteful Mediterranean vegan recipes just opens the door of adding some healthy, flavourful dishes to your diet nevertheless of being a vegan or not.

This cookbook is written with love and passion, and it’s beyond just a recipe

book.

As his students, me included, call him, Tal is a remarkable teacher. His compact book of one hundred and sixty-nine pages is filled with valuable and applicable knowledge on being happier.

He draws a lot from his young life as an athlete and into adult life as a Harvard professor, along with his wellbeing research. His book is set up in three parts: defining happiness, applying happiness, and meditations on happiness. Tal uses “time-in” to have readers stop and reflect on a question relevant to the reading material, which helps one better consider the material more thoughtfully.

The other thing about Tal as a teacher is his approach. It aligns greatly with my ideas about happiness, hence why I study his work. He, more specifically in his happiness studies program, fosters cultivating one's "wholebeing." A term I was already using when I came across his teachings. For me, happiness is… show more.

I recall reading it in my late teens, less as the classic it was on the barbarous Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, and more as a personal discovery by Orwell of how his democratic socialist instincts were sharpened and shaped by the buffeting swirl of ideological clashes and bitter sectarian struggles within the inspirational resistance to Franco’s fascism in Spain. As he witnessed the heroism and the horror, the passion and sometimes the ulterior purposes of these competing groups, Homage to Catalonia for me was a gripping narrative, climaxing in the internecine firefight in Barcelona where the left helped defeat itself, and thereby opened the door to Franco’s murderous victory and equally murderous rule. 

Like Orwell’s, the socialism that I had come to believe in during the first ten years of my life in Britain was instinctively ‘libertarian’ rather than ‘statist’, favouring democracy and liberty rather than central control… show more.