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The Holiday Season is upon us again!

As in years past, we have assembled a fantastic series of GiftGuides full of interesting ideas for our RainyDayMagazine readers. Our Guides include items we have reviewed during the year, new ones we haven’t posted yet, and a few from years past.

The one thing that stays the same year after year is the selection criteria: all of the recommendations are things we have actually touched and things we would actually want.

Happy Holidays!

Books

The popularity of Facebook, Twitter, and other constant interruptions are doing a job on our attention span. Sitting down and reading a book to learn something instead of asking Siri, Alexa, or Google are becoming a thing of the past. However, for many, the most enjoyable way to learn something new is still to go analog.

Antique New England Homes & Barns

by Jim DeStefano

This book reveals the essence of antique New England homes and barns—their history, the people who built them, why they were built that way, and how to restore them, piece by piece, without losing their character. Learn to identify architectural styles from different periods, how to strategize a restoration, and how to approach it systematically, from the timber frame to the floors, walls, and ceilings, windows and doors, wiring, finishes, and landscaping.

Wines of Vermont

by Todd Trzaskos

Vermont’s extreme climate may not seem ideal for wine production, but industry pioneers are proving otherwise. For nearly half a century, local winemakers developed distinctive fermentation techniques and adopted select crops to withstand icy winters. In 1970, Frank Jedlicka used traditional recipes to make wine with apples, maple and honey. North River and Grand View followed with other orchard and berry fruits. Harrison Lebowitz planted French hybrid grapes on a Lake Champlain island in the 1990s, and soon Vermont hosted some of America’s first true cold-climate vineyards. Fresh tastes and resurrected flavors now symbolize the Green Mountain State’s ripening wine industry. Todd Trzaskos reveals Vermont’s identity as an innovative and maturing wine producer.

Bird Families of the World

by Winkler, Billerman & Lovette

This edition offers a synopsis of the diversity of all birds, distilling the extensive detail of the 17-volume Handbook of Birds of the World into one book. It is designed to be simply the best single-volume entry to avian diversity available. The work is liberally illustrated with photographs from bird enthusiasts around the globe as well as paintings of one species from each of the genera in each family. Whether you are a birder with an interest in global bird diversity or a professional ornithologist, this beautiful and serviceable guide will provide a mental map to help birding enthusiasts organize their experiences.

How To Draw Cool Stuff

by Catherine Holmes

How to Draw Cool Stuff shows simple step-by-step illustrations that make it easy for anyone to draw cool stuff with precision and confidence. These pages will guide you through the basic principles of illustration by concentrating on easy-to-learn shapes that build into complex drawings. With the step-by-step guidelines provided, anything can become easy to draw. These books contain a series of fun, hands-on exercises that will help you see line, shape, space and other elements in everyday objects and turn them into detailed works of art in just a few simple steps.

A Field Guide to Lucid Dreaming

by Tuccillo, Zeizel, & Peisel

Readers will learn about the powerful REM sleep stage―a window into lucid dreams. Improve dream recall by keeping a journal. The importance of reality checks, such as “The Finger”―during the day, try to pass your finger through your palm; then, when you actually do it successfully, you’ll know that you’re dreaming. And once you become lucid, how to make the most of it. Every time you dream, you are washing up on the shores of your own inner landscape. Learn to explore a strange and thrilling world with A Field Guide to Lucid Dreaming.

Mindfulness

by Ellen Langer

This book is based on the highly innovative findings of social psychologist Dr. Ellen J. Langer and her team of researchers at Harvard. Dr. Langer’s unique concept of mindfulness is thoroughly adapted to contemporary life in the West. The theory has been applied to a wide number of fields, including health, business, aging, prejudice, and learning. There is now a new psychological assessment based on her work (called the Langer Mindfulness Scale) as well as an institute in Mexico founded to apply the concepts of mindfulness to health and wellness. In her introduction to this 25th anniversary edition, Dr. Langer outlines some of these exciting applications and suggests those still to come.

Pitch Anything

by Oren Klaff

According to Klaff, creating and presenting a great pitch isn’t an art–it’s a simple science. Applying the latest findings in the field of neuroeconomics, while sharing eye-opening stories of his method in action, Klaff describes how the brain makes decisions and responds to pitches. With this information, you’ll remain in complete control of every stage of the pitch process