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Food Guides: Essential & Delicious

The Flavor Thesaurus: Pairings, Recipes And Ideas For The Creative Cook

By Niki Segnit

In the store

An invaluable resource for foodies: seasoned or unseasoned!

Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

By Maira Kalman, Michael Pollan

In the store

How should a person eat? Michael Pollan's beautifully illustrated guide has all the answers!

Curious History of Food and Drink

By Ian Crofton

In the store

A fun, irreverent voyage through food history - food lovers and trivia junkies rejoice!

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Buzzfeed: It's All About the Bees!
  • Bee Time: Lessons from the Hive

    By Mark L Winston

  • Keeping The Bees: Why All Bees Are At Risk And What We Can Do To

    By Laurence Packer

  • Bees: Nature's Little Wonders

    By Candace Savage

  • Storey's Guide to Keeping Honey Bees: Honey Production, Pollination, Bee Health

    By Richard E. Bonney, Malcolm T. Sanford

  • Beekeeper's Bible: Bees Honey Recipes And Other Home Uses

    By Collins

Meditation: Where to Begin

Full Catastrophe Living (Revised Edition): Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness

By Thich Nhat Hanh, Jon Kabat-Zinn

In the store

The bible for secular mindfulness!

Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life

By Jon Kabat-Zinn

In the store

A lovely poetic series of reflections to accompany Full Catastrophe Living...

Meditation For Dummies, with Audio CD

By Stephan Bodian, Dean Ornish

In the store

A wide range of meditation practices suitable for beginners with CD...

Secular Meditation: 32 Practices for Cultivating Inner Peace, Compassion, and Joy - A Guide from the Humanist Community at Harvard

By Greg Epstein, Rick Heller

In the store

From the meditation leader of the Humanist Mindfulness Group at Harvard University....

The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness

By Jon Kabat-Zinn, John Teasdale, Mark Williams

In the store

Highly recommended by many therapists, includes a helpful CD...

Non-Fiction

REVIEW: A SWIM IN A POND IN THE RAIN

Review By Andrew Hood

Date: 10 Jan 2021

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A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life

I'm after kindness. Given... just about everything lately, I want to be somewhere careful and caring. I don't want to be told the world is anything it isn't, of course, but I want to know that all this harsh hardness is also marbled with softness, the coldness with warmth, and so on.

And so it's a boon, in this tumultuous first week of January, to receive a new book from George Saunders, whom I find to be one of fiction's finest purveyors of warmth and kindness, as well as these qualities' inverse. And while A Swim in a Pond in the Rain isn't fiction (we've all been tapping our foot since Saunders revolutionized the novel with Lincoln in the Bardo a few years ago) it's the next best thing: Saunders reading fiction. Taken from twenty years of teaching the Russian short story at Syracuse University, A Swim... consists of the full texts of seven stories from the likes of Checkov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol accompanied by professor Saunders' guided surveys. 

These are stories that Saunders considers "scale models of the world, made for the specific purpose of... [asking] the big questions, questions like How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how do we recognize it?" They're not necessarily the best known stories from these Ruskies but are ones that are always with Saunders as he crafts his own stories, "the high bar against which I measure my own."

The questions that Saunders asks the reader to ask of the texts are relatively simple but profoundly elucidating. "Was there a place you found particularly moving? Something you resisted or that confused you? A moment when you found yourself tearing up, getting annoyed, thinking anew? Any lingering questions about the story? Any answer is acceptable. If you felt it, it's valid." As Saunders unpacks these stories, answering for himself and perhaps for you, you get some sense of such compassion and curiosity makes its way into and is handled in his own work.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain quickly reveals itself as essential for both readers and writers. For the most part, Saunders does away with tentpole notions such as plot and theme and character and structure in favour of more practical and organic considerations. "Increased specification" stands in for characterization. "The writer asks, 'Which particular person is this, anyway?' and answers with a series of facts that have the effect of creating a narrowing path: ruling out certain possibilities, urging others forward." Structure, Saunders writes, is simply "an organized scheme hat allows the story to answer a question it has caused the reader to ask." It's a form of call-and-response. "A question arises organically from the story and then the story, very considerately, answers it. If we want to make good structure, we just have to be aware of what question we are causing the reader to ask, then answer that question."

Terming a story considerate, I think, reveals much about that kindness and warmth I (and hopefully you) find in Saunders' work. A good story is a welcoming and collaborative thing that has the reader in mind, sees the reader as a thinking and feeling and aspires to accommodate. "A story," Saunders writes, "is a frank, intimate conversation between equals." So is A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

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