Cities. Isn’t it wild that something so obvious to modern life is the topic of so many books?

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No, because we are humans with minds that crave to understand ourselves and our ways of living. Here are some books that play to that desire from a myriad of perspectives, that offer very different ways of ultimately making sense of a happy life in today’s geography: the city.

GARDENING: The Balcony Gardener, by Isabelle Palmer, $19.95, Cico Books

This book is literally an aesthetic inspiration from cover to cover. Palmer introduces the tools for growing in balcony containers, and presents a book that is at once fun (one spread is titled “Cocktail Window Box,” pgs. 94-95) and educational, with concise explanations about everything from “All About Potting Mix” to “Salad Crops.”

COOKING: The City Cook, by Kate McDonough, $20.00, Simon and Schuster

Apparently a projection of TheCityCook.com, this book explains pantry planning for delicious meals at home in the city. McDonough has studied urban planning and French cooking, and worked as a business executive. Wouldn’t you trust it?

I would be amiss to mention this book without also putting in a plug for the myriad of awesome cookbooks we house in the huge cooking section. Love visuals in your cookbooks? Step-by-step instructions or encyclopedic Spanish cookbooks? Need something about how to improvise or how to make a schoolyard vegetable garden or how to design a professional plate? We have it all.

(SUB)URBAN PLANNING: Walkable City by Jeff Speck, $27.00, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

Speck co-authored Suburban Nation (2000), which is in its 10th anniversary printing and still a relevant text. But what excites me about the brand new book Walkable City is that it tackles the problem of suburban sprawl in a horizontal way: it stands by the positive potential of cities in light of the sprawl.

How Buildings Learn by Steward Brand is about reading buildings and cities. Brand seems to appreciate cities through investigating their history, which is a different perspective but equally compelling and hopeful about the potential for our living spaces going forward.

URBAN CULTURE: A History of Future Cities by Daniel Brook, $27.95, W. W. Norton & Co.

This brand new book seems to utilize case studies of St. Petersburg, Bombay, and Shanghai, to make an argument about the part of social influence in the global order of today.

The breadth of these “city” books is poetic. I just remembered a striking book of poems I read in college called Ideal Cities. In it, Erika Meitner paints a landscape inside her baby’s nursery via the contrast with the urban frontier outside. What better way to illustrate the great part that modern geography plays in our very identity?

by Whitney

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