Reading the North

By Heather Lende (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, $22.95)

The blurb: Friends, family and faith help Haines resident Heather Lende attempt to discover the meaning in life. After getting run over by a truck in a near-fatal accident, Lende considers both the spiritual and earthly matters as she goes about her daily small town activities. The author will have book signings at Title Wave Books in Anchorage, 6:30 p.m. Thursday, and Fireside Books in Palmer, 5 p.m. Friday.

Excerpt: "Everyone was so proud of the recovery room they'd made me in an alcove of the living room that they wheeled me right over. (We don't have a downstairs bedroom and, remember, my room was now all the way up in the attic.) It seemed as if half the town had helped create my new digs. For the next two months we would be brought dinner every night and more cookies, soups, and casseroles than we could eat. The kids and Linnus had a list of credits for the improvements."

Cake Walk

By Kate Moses (Random House, $26)

The blurb: In this memoir of growing up in the '60s and '70s, the young Kate Moses turned to the kitchen when life was tough, and accompanying each tale from her life Moses includes a complementary recipe.

Excerpt: "We were spraweled out over the double beds in a room at the Captain Cook Hotel in downtown Anchorage, Alaska, where we were staying for a week while we waited for our newest house to be ready for us. My mom was reading to my brothers and me from a guidebook for recent arrivals to the Last Frontier, the title something like Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Living in Anchorage but Were Afraid to Ask. She was trying to get us excited about moving to Alaska, the exotic novelty of which had worn off about a day after we arrived. Billy and John were mildly intrigued by the idea that it would be light all night during the summer and we'd get to crosscountry ski to school in the winter, but the question I was afraid to ask was, how long do we have to stay here?"

-- Compiled by Gretchen Weiss, Anchorage Daily News