The folks at B'more Green invited me to visit from Read Street and suggest books with a green living theme. Here are some intriguing releases; I'll be back on a regular basis with new recommendations for your bookshelves. Let us know if you've found other good reads -- in fact, mention one in a comment here and we'll pick a lucky soul for a giveaway.

Running the Numbers: an American self-portrait by Chris Jordan. This visually arresting book accompanies a museum show in which Jordan illustrates the immensity of our wastefulness. In one image, the artist morphs Seurat's "A Sunday on Grand Jatte" by using cans of Sprite, Coke and other drinks in pointillist style to depict the 106,000 aluminum cans used in the U.S. every 30 seconds. Other images continue the environmental theme, though some stray into topics such as handguns and the Iraq war. The traveling show is now at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History; the closest it gets to Baltimore is Haverford College next January.

Farm City by Novella Carpenter. The book begins: "I have a farm on a dead-end street in the ghetto." That's a pretty good summary of her mission to create GhostTown Farm, an unlikely agricultural outpost in Oakland. Carpenter, who studied with locavore guru Michael Pollan, writes of the contrast between gritty city and vege-topia -- what Pollan calls "a mind-meld of Fifty Cent and Wendell Berry."