National Network for Equitable Library Service

Blue is a rare color - natural blue, that is. From morpho butterflies in the rain forest to the blue jay flitting past your window, vanishingly few living things are blue - and most that appear so are doing sleight of hand with physics or complex chemistry. Flowers modify the red pigment anthocyanin to achieve their blue hue. Even the blue sky above us is a trick of the light. Yet this hard-to-spot accent color in our surroundings looms large in our affections. Science journalist Kai Kupferschmidt has been fascinated by blue since childhood.

"Picturesque," "immense," "fantastic," and "sublime" are a few of the ways early British travellers described the landscape of the Rocky Mountains and the surrounding terrain. As part of a long tradition of British travellers' tales, these tourists-explorers, sportsmen, writers, scientists, artists, missionaries, and merchants-sought ways to describe the vastness and strangeness of the North American landscape to a British audience.

Bestselling author Doug Preston climbed aboard a rickety, single-engine plane carrying expensive laser technology that could map the terrain under the dense rainforest canopy. That flight revealed for the first time an unmistakeable image of a sprawling metropolis, tantalizing proof of not just the mythical city but an entire lost civilization.

Casting off another winter, Rachel Cusk and her family set out to Italy for three months in search of meaning, beauty, a cure for everything. With her husband and two children, Cusk uncovers the mystery of a foreign language, the perils and pleasures of unbelonging, and the startling thrill of discovery.

Travel is one thing, but really going somewhere is something else. Here are first-hand tales of exciting places to see in the US, Canada, Mexico, Europe, and the United Kingdom.

Katie Quinn spent months as an apprentice with some of Europe's most acclaimed experts to study the art and science of fermentation. Part artisanal survey, part travelogue, and part cookbook, this book provides a fascinating look at how each product is made, from harvest through fermentation.

Anthony Bourdain saw more of the world than nearly anyone. This book presents his life of experience collected into an entertaining, practical, fun, and frank travel guide to some of his favorite places, in his own words. Supplementing Bourdain's words are a handful of essays by friends, colleagues, and family that tell even deeper stories about the place.

Marcello Di Cintio first visited Palestine in 1999. Like most outsiders, the Palestinian narrative that he knew had been simplified by a seemingly unending struggle, a near-Sisyphean curse of stories of oppression, exile, and occupation told over and over again. In Pay No Heed to the Rockets , he reveals a more complex story, the Palestinian experience as seen through the lens of authors, books, and literature.

When Ben Aitken learnt that his gran had enjoyed a four-night holiday including four three-course dinners, four cooked breakfasts, four games of bingo, a pair of excursions, sixteen pints of lager and luxury return coach travel, all for a hundred pounds, he thought, that's the life, and signed himself up. Six times over. Good value aside, what Ben was really after was the company of his elders - those with more chapters under their belt, with the wisdom granted by experience, the candour gifted by time, and the hard-earned ability to live each day like it's nearly their last.

In conversations with drivers ranging from veterans of foreign wars to Indigenous women protecting one another, Di Cintio explores the borderland of the North American taxi. "The taxi," writes Marcello Di Cintio, "is a border." Occupying the space between public and private, a cab brings together people who might otherwise never have met-yet most of us sit in the back and stare at our phones. Nowhere else do people occupy such intimate quarters and share so little.