I bought Nancie McDermott's Southern Pies: A Gracious Plenty of Pie Recipes, From Lemon Chess to Chocolate Pecan ($2.99) last year and it's on sale again, just in time to find a few recipes to try out for the holidays.Book Description
Ask any pie lover—the words "southern" and "pie" go together like ripe fruit and flaky pastry. And behind all the mouthwatering, light-as-a-cloud meringue peaks and the sticky dark butterscotch fillings lies a rich and delicious history. In Southern Pies, some of the South's most famous bakers share recipes for 70 pies. Perfect for bakers of all skill levels, these pies are made with simple, easy-to-find, and gloriously few ingredients. Featuring such classics as Sweet Tea Pie and New Orleans Creole Coconut Pie, this tasty homage will fill everyone at the table with Southern hospitality.
The Latte Rebellion ($1.99), by Sarah Jamila StevensonBook Description
Hoping to raise money for a post-graduation trip to London, Asha Jamison and her best friend Carey decide to sell T-shirts promoting the Latte Rebellion, a club that raises awareness of mixed-race students.
But seemingly overnight, their "cause" goes viral and the T-shirts become a nationwide social movement. As new chapters spring up from coast to coast, Asha realizes that her simple marketing plan has taken on a life of its own—and it's starting to ruin hers. Asha's once-stellar grades begin to slip, threatening her Ivy League dreams, while her friendship with Carey hangs by a thread. And when the peaceful underground movement spins out of control, Asha's school launches a disciplinary hearing. Facing expulsion, Asha must decide how much she's willing to risk for something she truly believes in.
Age Level: 12 and up
The Quiche of Death ($2.99) is the first title M C Beaton's long running and extremely popular Agatha Raisin mystery series.Book Description
Putting all her eggs in one basket, Agatha Raisin gives up her successful PR firm, sells her London flat, and samples a taste of early retirement in the quiet village of Carsely. Bored, lonely and used to getting her way, she enters a local baking contest: Surely a blue ribbon for the best quiche will make her the toast of the town. But her recipe for social advancement sours when Judge Cummings-Browne not only snubs her entry—but falls over dead! After her quiche’s secret ingredient turns out to be poison, she must reveal the unsavory truth…
Agatha has never baked a thing in her life! In fact, she bought her entry ready-made from an upper crust London quicherie. Grating on the nerves of several Carsely residents, she is soon receiving sinister notes. Has her cheating and meddling landed her in hot water, or are the threats related to the suspicious death? It may mean the difference between egg on her face and a coroner’s tag on her toe…
Rule of Three ($1.99), the second title in Megan McDonald's The Sisters Club series, looks like a good choice for the younger set. And, although there is no food on the cover, The Sisters Club, the first in the series, is also on sale for $1.99.Book Description
Alex has always been the Actor with-a-capital-A in the Reel family, and middle-sister Stevie has always been content behind the scenes. But when the school play turns out to be a musical, Stevie decides that she’s tired of being the Sensible One. Maybe, for once, she’d like to be in the spotlight! Soon the dueling divas—with little sister Joey egging them on—are in a fierce competition to see who has what it takes to play the Princess. Has Stevie broken the rules by going for what she wants, or will it be Alex who hands down the biggest betrayal of all?
Grade Level: 3 and up
The Greenhouse ($1.99), by Audur Ava Olafsdottir and Brian FitzGibbon (Translator).Book Description
Young Lobbi was preparing to leave his childhood home, his autistic brother, his octogenarian father, and the familiar landscape of mossy lava fields for an unknown future. Soon before his departure, he received an awful phone call: his mother was in a car accident. She used her dying words to offer calm advice to her son, urging him to continue their shared work in the greenhouse tending to the rare Rosa candida. Prior to his mother’s death, in that very same greenhouse, Lobbi made love to Anna, a friend of a friend, and just as he readies his departure he learns that in their brief night together they conceived a child. He is still reeling from this chain of events when he arrives at his new job, reinstating the rare eight-petaled rose in the majestic forgotten garden of an ancient European monastery. In focusing his energy cultivating the rarest rose, he also learns to cultivate love, with the help of a film buff monk and his newborn daughter, Flora Sol.
Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs: A True Story of Bad Breaks and Small Miracles ($2.99), by Heather LendeBook Description
The Alaskan landscape—so vast, dramatic, and unbelievable—may be the reason the people in Haines, Alaska (population 2,400), so often discuss the meaning of life. Heather Lende thinks it helps make life mean more. Since her bestselling first book, If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name, a near-fatal bicycle accident has given Lende a few more reasons to consider matters both spiritual and temporal. Her idea of spirituality is rooted in community, and here she explores faith and forgiveness, loss and devotion—as well as raising totem poles, canning salmon, and other distinctly Alaskan adventures. Lende’s irrepressible spirit, her wry humor, and her commitment to living a life on the edge of the world resonate on every page. Like her own mother’s last wish—take good care of the garden and dogs—Lende’s writing, so honest and unadorned, deepens our understanding of what links all humanity.
Of Blood and Honey ($1.99), by Stina Leicht Book Description
Liam never knew who his father was. The town of Derry had always assumed that he was the bastard of a protestant — his mother never spoke of him, and Liam assumed he was dead. But when the war between the fallen and the fey began to heat up, Liam and his family are pulled into a conflict that they didn’t know existed. A centuries old conflict between supernatural forces seems to mirror the political divisions in 1970’s era Ireland, and Liam is thrown headlong into both conflicts! Only the direct intervention of Liam’s real father, and a secret catholic order dedicated to fighting “The Fallen” can save Liam... from the mundane and supernatural forces around him, and from the darkness that lurks within him.
Honeybee: Lessons from an Accidental Beekeeper ($2.99), by C. Marina MarcheseBook Description
In 1999, Marina Marchese fell in love with bees during a tour of a neighbor's honeybee hives. She quit her job, acquired her own bees, built her own hives, harvested honey, earned a certificate in apitherapy, studied wine tasting in order to transfer those skills to honey tasting, and eventually opened her own honey business. Today, Red Bee® Honey sells artisanal honey and honey-related products to shops and restaurants all over the country.
More than an inspiring story of one woman's transformative relationship with honeybees (some of nature's most fascinating creatures), Honeybee is also bursting with information about all aspects of bees, beekeeping, and honey—including life inside the hive; the role of the queen, workers, and drones; pollination and its importance to sustaining all life; the culinary pleasures of honey; hiving and keeping honeybees; the ancient practice of apitherapy, or healing with honey, pollen, and bee venom; and much more.
Recipes for food and personal care products appear throughout. Also included is an excellent, one-of-a-kind appendix that lists 75 different honey varietals, with information on provenance, tasting notes, and food-and-wine pairings.
The Healing Powers of Honey ($3.99), by Cal Orey Book Description
Did you know?...
- Known as Mother Nature's "nectar of the gods," honey was praised for its healing powers as far back as 5,000 years ago by Egyptians.
- Eating honey can help lower the risk of heart disease, cancer , diabetes--even help reduce body fat and unwanted weight!--and increase longevity.
- Pure, raw, unprocessed honey is a healthier sweetener than table sugar and high fructose corn syrup. It's chock-full of antioxidants, minerals, and vitamins--and only has 21 calories per teaspoon.
- Super "bee foods" (including nutrient-rich bee pollen, propolis, and royal jelly) are used and touted for their healing powers by beekeepers and medical experts in the present-day.
- Honey can relieve a variety of ailments, including allergies, coughs, fatigue, pain, and stress, as well as boost libido.
- The honey bee pollinates about one-third of the food we consume (including nutritious fruits and nuts).
Drawing on the latest honey buzz and interviews with medical doctors, beekeepers, and researchers, this charming and enlightening book (sweetened with stories about honey bees and humans) reveals 30 healing honey varieties paired with cinnamon and teas, tells you how to incorporate honey into Mediterranean-style, heart-healthy recipes like Honey Custard French Toast, Honey-Glazed Game Hen, and Filo Pear and Honey Tarts, and provides more than 50 home cures that combat digestive woes to skin woes. You'll also enjoy Cleopatra's milk-and-honey beauty treatments and eco-friendly beeswax household uses--all made with the amazing honey bee's gifts!
Put 'em Up!: A Comprehensive Home Preserving Guide for the Creative Cook, from Drying and Freezing to Canning and Pickling ($2.99), by Sherri Brooks Vinton Book Description
PRESERVING IS BACK, AND IT’S BETTER THAN EVER. Flavors are brighter, batch sizes are more flexible, and modern methods make the process safer and easier. Eating locally is on everybody's mind, and nothing is more local than Heirloom Salsa made from vine-fresh tomatoes or a quick batch of Ice-Box Berry Jam saved from the seasons last berries. Even beginners who never made peach jam or dill pickles in their grandmothers kitchens are eager to pick up preserving skills as a way to save money, extend the local harvest, and control the quality of preserved ingredients.
The step-by-step instructions in Put ‘em Up will have the most timid beginners filling their pantries and freezers with the preserved goodness of summer in no time. An extensive Techniques section includes complete how-to for every kind of preserving: refrigerating and freezing, air- and oven-drying, cold- and hot-pack canning, and pickling. And with recipe yields as small as a few pints or as large as several gallons, readers can easily choose recipes that work for the amount of produce and time at hand.
Real food advocate Sherri Brooks Vinton offers recipes with exciting flavor combinations to please contemporary palates and put preserved fruits and vegetables on dinner-party menus everywhere. Pickled Asparagus and Wasabi Beans are delicious additions to holiday relish trays; Sweet Pepper Marmalade perks up cool-weather roasts; and Berry Bourbon is an unexpected base for a warming cocktail.
The best versions of tried-and-true favorites are all here too. Bushels of fresh-picked apples are easily turned into applesauce, dried fruit rings, jelly, butter, or even brandy. Falling-off-the-vine tomatoes can be frozen whole, oven dried, canned, or made into a tangy marinara. Options for pickling cucumbers range from Bread and Butter Chips and Dill Spears to Asian Ice-Box Pickles. Something delicious for every pantry!
How to Stay Alive in the Woods: A Complete Guide to Food, Shelter and Self-Preservation Anywhere ($2.99), by Bradford AngierBook Description
HOW TO STAY ALIVE IN THE WOODS is a practical, readable-and potentially indispensable-manual for anyone venturing into the great outdoors.
Broken down into four essential sections, Sustenance, Warmth, Orientation and Safety, this enlightening guide reveals how to catch game without a gun, what plants to eat (full-color illustrations of these make identification simple), how to build a warm shelter, make clothing, protect yourself and signal for help. Detailed illustrations and expanded instructions, newly commissioned for this deluxe edition, offer crucial information at a glance, making How to Stay Alive in the Woods truly a lifesaver.
Dave Miller's Homebrewing Guide: Everything You Need to Know to Make Great-Tasting Beer ($2.99), by Dave Miller Book Description
In this comprehensive guide to homebrewing, Miller clearly explains the best techniques for every step of the entire brewing process. Clear enough for the novice but thorough enough to earn a home in the libraries of brewmasters, this is the essential volume on brewing great-tasting beer at home.
Thirst ($2.99), by Andrei Gelasimov and Marian Schwartz (Translator)Book Description
Masterfully translated from the original Russian by award-winning translator Marian Schwartz, Thirst tells the story of 20-year-old Chechen War veteran Kostya. Maimed beyond recognition by a tank explosion, he spends weeks on end locked inside his apartment, his sole companions the vodka bottles spilling from the refrigerator. But soon Kostya’s comfortable if dysfunctional cocoon is torn open when he receives a visit from his army buddies who are mobilized to locate a missing comrade. Through this search for his missing friend, Kostya is able to find himself.
How's Your Drink?: Cocktails, Culture, and the Art of Drinking Well ($0.99), by Eric FeltenBook Description
Based on the popular feature in the Saturday Wall Street Journal, How's Your Drink illuminates the culture of the cocktail. John F. Kennedy played nuclear brinksmanship with a gin and tonic in his hand. Teddy Roosevelt took the witness stand to testify that six mint juleps over the course of his presidency did not make him a drunk. Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Chandler both did their part to promote the gimlet. Eric Felten tells all of these stories and many more, and also offers exhaustively researched cocktail recipes.
Taste: A Life in Wine ($4.24), by Anthony Terlato Book Description
Anthony Terlato's story is not simply the usual CEO narrative of achieving business success, nor i it the typical winemaker's tale of pursuing perfection in a glass. Straddling both of those stories, Terlato uses broad strokes to show how one individual had an enormous impact on Americans' wine-drinking habits. Wine journalist Linda Murphy described Terlato in the San Francisco Chronicle as "one of the most accomplished wine personalities on the planet," and readers of this account of a 50-year love affair with wine see this affable, intelligent man at his finest.
Wahoo Rhapsody ($1.99), an Atticus Fish novel by Shaun MoreyBook Description
Take one sea-loving captain, a drug-smuggling first mate, and a novice deckhand with a secret, and you have the motley crew of the Wahoo Rhapsody, a ramshackle fishing charter plying the Pacific’s waters off the coast of Cabo San Lucas. Captain Winston Weber makes an honest, if lean, living running fishing charters between Mexico and California, with no inkling of the fact that his first mate, Weevil Ott, is smuggling marijuana inside the yellowfin tuna stacked in the boat’s hold. But when Weevil decides to skim a small fortune for himself, goons under orders from the mysterious drug lord known only as “La Cucaracha” descend upon the Wahoo Rhapsody. What ensues is a madcap romp that will catapult readers from Cabo San Lucas to Tucson and San Diego, as Winston, Weevil, and an expat American lawyer by the name of Atticus Fish try to outrun La Cucaracha’s bloody reach. Fans of Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard will relish this rollicking satirical adventure from award-winning writer Shaun Morey.
Skinny Seafood: Over 100 delectable low-fat recipes for preparing nature's underwater bounty ($0.99), by Barbara Grunes Book Description
Seafood eating is healthy eating. But preparing exciting and delicious fish and shellfish can be a challenge. Skinny Seafood meets the challenge with 100 new recipes that are as inventive as they are easy to make. Banish bland, ho-hum fish forever, and start enjoying the bounty of the sea for great taste as well as good health.
Skinny Seafood's recipes make it easy to prepare seafood. Most dishes require little cooking time, and fish is surprisingly economical when purchased fresh. All of the recipes employ simple preparation techniques to control fat, calories, and cholesterol. Likewise, the scores of creative sauces and accompaniments rely on herbs, spices, an fresh natural ingredients for flavor rather than fat-laden oils and butter.
Fish was never like this: Trout with Mango and Blueberry Sauce, Salsa Red Snapper, Sole and Shrimp with Tequila and more
Skinny Grilling: Over 100 inventive low-fat recipes for meats, fish, poultry, vegetables & desserts ($0.99), by Barbara GrunesBook Description
The barbecue grill is an American icon. In suburbia it's a backyard fixture. In cities it appears on tiny balconies. At picnics and beach parties it's indispensable. Yet the food we usually grill has a fatty sameness that does justice neither to the cook's skill or the diners' good health.
Barbara Grunes, author of over 50 cookbooks and maven of grill cookery, puts an end to routine, fat-laden barbecues once and for all with Skinny Grilling's 100 exciting new recipes. This unique collection establishes grill cooking as a versatile culinary technique in its own right, no longer limited to chicken, ribs, and hamburgers.
Now home cooks can grill--easily and without fuss--delicious roasts, succulent seafood, smoked turkeys, bubbling pizzas, and dozens more main dishes. But that's just the beginning. Over the same coals, readers can quickly turn out juicy vegetables, creative salads, unforgettable smoked meats, oriental stir-fries in the wok--even fabulous desserts! Also included is a wonderful red-white-and-blue 5-course 4th of July feast.
Families and friends love the festivity and fun of cookouts, and Skinny Grilling will provide an inventive recipe collection to vastly extend any cook's grilling repertory. Even better, the food prepared from this book will be low in fat, high in flavor, and anything but routine.
Skinny Pizza: Over 100 healthy recipes for America's favorite food ($0.99), by Barbara GrunesBook Description
Pizza is America's national fun food. And now--thanks to Barbara Grunes' innovative recipes--pizza qualifies as America's national good-health food, too. These 100-plus recipes trim away the excess fat, cholesterol, and calories that usually come with pizza, so families can enjoy all the great tastes without sacrificing good nutrition.
Starting with easy-to-make (and store) recipes for basic crusts and sauces, Skinny Pizzas shows you how easy it is to top pizzas with fresh, low-fat, high-fiber vegetables, dairy products, fruits, poultry, meat, and fish--everything from zucchini and pears to smoked salmon. From hearty one-dish meals to pizza snacks, appetizers, party dishes, and even desserts--all slimmed down for today's healthful lifestyle--home cooks can feel good about serving pizza any time and for any occasion.
All recipes include diabetic exchanges and nutritional specifics on fat, cholesterol, sodium, calories, and percent of calories from fat. Recipes conform to the American Heart Association guidelines regarding the percent daily intake of calories from fat.
- Tomato-based pizzas: Shrimp, mushroom, chicken, spinach, tuna, peppers, artichoke, eggplant, and more.
- Non-tomato-based pizzas: Teriyaki, salmon, bok choy, goat's cheese, clam, turkey, stir-fry, zucchini, and more.
- Pizza on the grill: Fajita, vegetarian, Thai-flavored, salsa, olive, ratatouille, mango, barbecue, and more.
- Specialty pizzas: Creole, Szechwan, smoked turkey, scallop, focaccia, crab cake, nacho, English muffin, and more.
- Dessert pizzas: Apple, mint brownie, cheesecake, strawberry yogurt, rum-raisin, and more.
Speedy Suppers Cookbook: Simple meals for a family-on-the-go, all in about 30 minutes or less! ($2.99), by Gooseberry PatchBook Description
Simple meals for busy families! Speedy Suppers cookbook features delicious dishes that are ready in 30 minutes or less like baked ziti supreme, quick-as-lightning enchiladas and easy, breezy caramel brownies. 224 pages.
Good Eating's Best of the Best: Great Recipes of the Past Decade from the Chicago Tribune Test Kitchen ($0.99), edited by Carol Mighton HaddixBook Description
In this, it's first new cookbook in more than a decade, the Chicago Tribune offers 50 of the very best recipes from the pages of the paper’s weekly Good Eating section. The Tribune remains one of the few newspapers in this country with its own working test kitchen, which ensures that the recipes are accurate and reliable. Each year, staff members choose their favorites. Now, the best of those winning recipes are compiled in a book that reflects how we having been cooking--and eating--over the last decade.
The book features recipes from across the wide range of common kitchen offerings: starters, meat and poultry dishes, seafood, pasta, rice, side dishes, salads, baked goods, and desserts. In addition, a section on menu planning offers readers ideas for entertaining.
Good Eating's Seasonal Salads: Fresh and Creative Recipes for Spring, Summer, Winter, and Fall ($3.99 pre-order), by the Chicago Tribune StaffBook Description
Good Eating’s Seasonal Salads is a collection of 90 delicious recipes from the Chicago Tribune’s Good Eating section that are perfect as exciting side dishes or full, healthy meals. Making use of fresh in-season ingredients, this eclectic assortment of salads features flavorful options for every month of the year. Salads range in style and substance, from practical and quick to creative and gourmet, light and simple to hearty and robust, and from classic stand-bys to unique innovations.
Each recipe provides a series of healthy eating tips and is grouped into categories based on its main ingredients, including greens, vegetables, potatoes, eggs, poultry, meat, seafood, rice, grains, beans, pasta, fruit, and dressings. Especially useful is the book’s broad selection of winter salads, including delicious whole-grain salads and tips on seasonal produce. Each section is introduced by an entertaining narrative passage informing readers on topics such as the rise in popularity of Romaine lettuce and kale or the history behind the Caesar and Cobb salads. Good Eating’s Seasonal Salads also offers the culinary creations of several experienced cooks who provide their own perspectives and voice to the recipes.
Salads are versatile and healthful options for snacks or meals, lunch or dinner, summer or winter, and they let home cooks save money by creatively using leftovers in refreshing ways. Good Eating’s Seasonal Salads is ideal for novice and expert home cooks alike who are looking to prepare healthy, inexpensive, and appetizing salads using the freshest year-round ingredients.
Grant Achatz: The Remarkable Rise of America's Most Celebrated Young Chef ($1.99), by the Chicago Tribune StaffBook Description
Grant Achatz's career as a chef has been built around beating the odds—from his humble Midwestern beginnings and rise to stardom in Chicago; his iconoclastic vision of the American dining experience; and his life-threatening battle with cancer that temporarily stripped him of his ability to taste. In all these situations, Achatz defiantly and definitively surmounted innumerable obstacles to become—and remain—one of the world's most recognizable and respected chefs.
Grant Achatz: The Remarkable Rise of America's Most Celebrated Young Chef, a collection of articles taken from the Chicago Tribune, is an up-close examination of Achatz's personal history and international impact in the culinary world. Included are rare interviews on Achatz's humble beginnings as a young chef and modest lifestyle, stories from his stint as executive chef of Evanston, Illinois's four-star restaurant Trio, long-unseen restaurant reviews, as well as features on his innovative restaurants Aviary and Next, which play with Achatz's trademark concept of molecular gastronomy and the importance of presentation and memory in fine dining.
In the middle of all this success, Achatz was diagnosed with stage-four squamous cell carcinoma, a rare cancer afflicting the tongue that completely eliminated Achatz's sense of taste. Told he would die if he did not have his tongue surgically removed, Achatz tenaciously clung to the belief he would be able to regain the sense most vital to his extraordinary talent. While undergoing experimental treatment to regain his sense of taste, Achatz continued to manage Alinea and even improved it despite his professionally debilitating condition. Miraculously, Achatz made a full recovery and regained his ability to taste while going on to open one of the culinary world's most discussed and praised new restaurants: Next.
Grant Achatz tells the story of the man at the forefront of modern culinary trends and the world's top-rated restaurants, as seen through both his own eyes and the journalists who have been covering his fights against the odds from the beginning.
The Italian Slow Cooker ($2.99), by Michele Scicolone, is one that I bought last year.Book Description
Finally a book that combines the fresh, exuberant flavors of great Italian food with the ease and comfort of a slow cooker. Michele Scicolone, a best-selling author and an authority on Italian cooking, shows how good ingredients and simple techniques can lift the usual “crockpot” fare into the dimension of fine food. Pasta with Meat and Mushroom Ragu, Osso Buco with Red Wine, Chicken with Peppers and Mushrooms: These are dishes that even the most discriminating cook can proudly serve to company, yet all are so carefree that anyone with just five or ten minutes of prep time can make them on a weekday and return to perfection.
Simmered in the slow cooker, soups, stews, beans, grains, pasta sauces, and fish are as healthy as they are delicious. Polenta and risotto, “stir-crazy” dishes that ordinarily need careful timing, are effortless. Meat loaves come out perfectly moist, tough cuts of meat turn succulent, and cheesecakes emerge flawless.
The Everything Soup, Stew, and Chili Cookbook ($1.99), by Belinda Hulin, is another one I bought last year.Book Description
Creamy New England clam chowder. Hearty beef stew. Fresh vegetarian chili. Soups, stews, and chilies are comforting meals the whole family enjoys; and to top it off, they’re inexpensive to create! This cookbook includes information and cooking tips, as well as 300 mouthwatering recipes, including:
Whether you are in the mood for a chilled fruit soup on a warm summer day or a comforting meat-and-potato stew on a cold winter night, this book has everything! No matter what the season or occasion, you will find a choice that hits the spot.
- Smoked Duck and Squash Soup
- Ginger Beef Soup with Dumplings
- Creamy Asparagus Soup
- Sirloin and Black Bean Chili
- Mixed Bean Vegetarian Chili
- Warm Apple-Cranberry Stew
- Blackberry Stew with Sweet Biscuits
Eat, Sleep, Ride: How I Braved Bears, Badlands, and Big Breakfasts in My Quest to Cycle the Tour Divide ($9.99), by Paul Howard, isn't discounted, but looks to be a good read. I've downloaded a sample and will probably stick it on my wishlist, to keep an eye on and consider as a holiday gift.Book Description
For Paul Howard, who has ridden the entire Tour de France route during the race itself—setting off at 4 am each day to avoid being caught by the pros—riding a small mountain-bike race should hold no fear. Still, this isn’t just any mountain-bike race. This is the Tour Divide.
Running from Banff in Canada to the Mexican border, the Tour Divide is more than 2,700 miles—500 miles longer than the Tour de France. Its route along the Continental Divide goes through the heart of the Rocky Mountains and involves more than 200,000 feet of ascent—the equivalent of climbing Mount Everest seven times.
The other problem is that Howard has never owned a mountain bike—and how will training on the South Downs in southern England prepare him for sleeping rough in the Rockies? Entertaining and engaging, Eat, Sleep, Ride will appeal to avid and aspiring cyclers, as well as fans of adventure/travel narrative with a humorous twist.
, which details her life on a 100 acre farm with 200 beehives, and her followup book 
that has more about beekeeping tasks and when to do them, interspersed with her prose. Both are an honest look at the real work involved in having so many bees. And there is some manual labor in even one hive -- honey is heavy and so are the boxes and frames used for your hive; even bees add to the weight when a hive is densely populated, with a deep hive body full of honey and bees topping 90 lbs (fear not, there are ways to avoid lifting anything this heavy). By the second book, her farm has expanded to 300 hives, with some scattered about on other properties. All in all, it's a good description of a typical sideliner beekeeper, which is the title for those who have grown beyond the hobbyist level, but are not yet considered commercial beekeepers (who migrate their bees around the nation on a constant basis).
. A young man from Pennsylvania buys a honey ranch, then ends up herding his bees from Florida in the winter (where he raises 10,000 queens) to the badlands of southern Saskatchewan in summer. Covering a ten year span, this is a look at one of the few people who have kept bees across the US-Canadian border.
. Although many of the practices are now outdated, this is a classic in beekeeping.
. No matter how yours misbehave, they'll be a lot tamer than the bees depicted here. Don't confuse this one with The Birds, although the group of that name does make a cameo appearance.
from Cornell University, one of the nation's top research sites for honeybees and developing new varieties of fruit trees (among other things). A book seldom makes a third edition without a lot of sales and in this case, each edition has been updated with the latest research and status of honeybee diseases and pests.
and 
. The first covers practically every topic you can thing of that pertains to honeybees, while the second specifically deals with the threats your hives.
. While giving a good overview of what is going on with CCD, which is still being investigated by top researchers around the world, and it's possible consequences, this particular book has a definite political slant. Right now, CCD is a collection of symptoms (a disorder, not a disease); only when the true source has identified will we be able to name the culprit (and find a cure). The prospects of growing food without the european honeybees, an insect that has been cultivated by man for nearly as long as he has farmed, are definitely not all rosy (although roses won't be affected). While rice, wheat and corn (and other grass grains) do not need honeybees to be grown as crops, many other staple foods do: beans (including soybeans), squash, peppers and many more. Alfalfa doesn't need pollination before being feed to cattle, but does use honeybees on fields where seed will be grown for the alfalfa farmers. Canola is another heavily pollinated crop, as are some crops that may not technically need honeybees (the alternate pollinator is in parentheses next to each), but have much higher yields when they are used: tomatoes (wind pollinated, bumblebees in greenhouses), apples (orchard mason bees) and blueberries (some native bees are better suited, but not easily raised in the numbers needed). However, the costs of raising enough of the alternate pollinators (which often have no honey crop to offset costs to the beekeeper) and/or the lower yields of wind pollinated crops will probably mean much higher prices in stores, if the european honeybee were to disappear. It's true that the european honeybee is not native to the US (or many other parts of the world) and that native pollinators do exist (or did) in most areas. The difference is the increased yield that commercial honeybees bring to intensive monocrops and the decline of native pollinators in nearly any area that is commercially farmed (or subject to typical surbuban grass monoculture practices). I'd skip this one for now and instead keep up with the topic in the bee journals (see below) and wait until a treatment is found before worrying too much about laying blame.
. Many starting beekeepers skip this one for a while, instead opting for 
that I mentioned yesterday, but you really can't go wrong with either one (or both - they seldom overlap in their coverage).
and at $13.59, it's an inexpensive way to get your feet wet. It's fairly detailed and has lots of pictures, but if the cartoons and "for dummies" style isn't for you, there are several other good choices (which I'd recommend in any event). 
has worked for the USDA Honey Bee Research Lab, written for and edited 
, also at that same $13.59 price.
and 
, both by Richard E. Bonney. The approaches of the two books are different, with the former oriented around when to perform tasks, while the second is organized in a more traditional manner. There is some overlap, but both are excellent references.
not only covers the basics of beekeeping, but also goes into detail on how to make the hive boxes and frames yourself. Even if you don't want to start from scratch, a basic understanding can make assembling the precut pieces a lot easier, as well as convincing you that you really should both glue and cross nail every single frame. For the more visually oriented and those who cannot find a local club or beekeeper to be a mentor, you may want to pick up 
on DVD.
. Just don't be surprised if you don't find any local beekeepers following all it's methods and that you local bee inspector advises you not to follow it's advice.
and for a magazine, look to 
. The links are for those in the US; as far as I can tell, Amazon doesn't sell magazine subscriptions in the UK, nor do they have a direct link to get this book (although several third party sellers do have it). Either, however, should get you started and cover that uniquely English crop, heather, which can be quite difficult to extract.
and 
), books by and about people who keep bees (
, 
), a few classics (
, 
and a couple that are definitely not bargain books: