The Urban Sketching Handbook: Working with Color is both instructional and inspirational. The book teaches how to use color to convey mood and emotions in urban sketches and should appeal to anyone looking for guidance and fresh ideas.

The book is packed with wonderful artworks and would be good to keep at hand just for the inspiration they provide. Author Shari Blaukopf does a thorough job of discussing how to pick, create and use palettes and gets into the specifics of mixing colors to create proper tone and emotions.

Working with Color (digital galley, Quarry Books) does not, however, dive into the basic techniques of sketching and drawing. There are other Urban Sketching Handbooks for that. This book is best suited to those who consider themselves to be beyond the absolute beginner level who are interested in improving their use of color.

Improv Nation is an exhaustive history of improv, from its beginnings in Chicago in the 1950s through current day. Sam Wasson’s book catalogs the important characters, events and institutions of improve and fluctuates from sharing compelling and funny stories to reading like a textbook. This book will go down as an important work recording this uniquely American art form.

Midhat Kamal dreams of his bright future as he travels to Paris during WWI to attend university, in The Parisian. While there the young Palestinian discovers love, loss and the bitter bite of prejudice.

After the war Kamal returns to a Palestine under British rule where he begins to learn his family textile business and start a family. But as political tensions erupt in the region, he can’t help but be swept along in the flow.

Isabella Hammad has a beautiful writing style and has a lot of material to work with in The Parisian (digital galley, Grove Press). Unfortunately the plot moves at a sluggish pace and the story often ebbs. If you have the time, Hammad’s vivid descriptions and wonderful turns of phrase are enough to give this novel a chance.

I’m about a third of the way into Midnight in Chernobyl, an account of the 1986 nuclear accident. It’s shocking to read about the number of institutional and design errors that led to the event and then about the missteps in reacting to it.

Even before Chernobyl the Soviets had a history of accidents and meltdowns at their reactors. There was even a prior meltdown at one of the Chernobyl reactors you probably didn’t know about due to layers of Soviet secrecy.

The first sign in the west of an accident was when workers reporting to a Swedish nuclear power plant started setting of radiation alarms when entering the facility because they had picked up so much Chernobyl radiation from the landscape.

In contrast to Chernobyl, the Swedish authorities immediately alerted the nearby town and ordered a facility evacuation. The type and amount of radiation made them think it was their plant leaking. They soon new better.

Chris Rush began doing drugs at the age of 12 when his sister’s friend gave him acid. This began his long embrace of the American counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s, which Rush recalls in his poignant memoir The Light Years.

The son of a wealthy, Roman Catholic New Jersey couple, Rush was prone as a boy to running through his neighborhood in a pink satin cape. He was eventually ostracized from his family because of his father’s hostile attitude toward Rush’s behaviour and mannerisms.

Rush spent time in a series of boarding schools and then fled out west for a number of risky adventures, eventually landing in the Arizona wilderness. During this time he better came to understand his own sexuality as a young gay man. His parents were largely indifferent to his activities while he was away. They were always more focused on their own lives and troubled marriage.

Rush, a renowned artist whose work appears in many museum collections, has written a masterful coming of age story. The Light Years (digital galley, Farrar, Straus and Giroux) paints a vivid picture of a young man searching for his place in the world. Rush shows remarkable grace in recalling a trying adolescence that would have broken many individuals.

If you’re looking for a little push to get started with drawing with pens, Portfolio: Beginning Pen & Ink (digital galley, Quarto Publishing Group) is a good place to start. The book does not get bogged down in descriptions of equipment, as some art books do. It covers those basics quickly and moves on to instruction.

Make no mistake, this is a book geared to beginners. It moves at a pace suitable for those getting started, as I am. Author and artist Desarae Lee gives specific and achievable instructions that clearly explain the concepts. And the exercises that accompany each chapter helped improve my understanding of the drawing techniques.

At 128 pages, the book is short and quick to get through. Anything longer might overwhelm anyone just getting started. I felt like Portfolio: Beginning Pen & Ink gave me a good starting point from which to practice before moving on to more advanced instruction.