THIS HILL, THIS VALLEY <i> By Hal Borland with drawings by Peter Marks (Johns Hopkins: $13.95) </i>

Since its first publication in 1957, Hal Borland’s journal of a year on his farm in western Connecticut has been regarded as an example of nature writing at its best. Borland shares his delight in the seasons and the details that bear witness to their passing. He records the cyclic pageant of flowers, insects, vegetables and animals in clean, elegant prose, marveling at the delicacy of an insect’s wing, the strength of an ancient Norway spruce or the resilience of the chipmunk families that inhabit the old stone walls on his property. His evocative descriptions of the contemplative melancholy of autumn and the fragile beauties of a New England winter seem very far away from the smoggy, seemingly endless Los Angeles summer.