Readers Itch

By Bill Bryson

Doubleday Canada, 64 pages, $19.00

If it's Saturday, this must be Nairobi. At least that's the way it seems Bill Bryson experienced Africa during his week-long visit to Kenya. His journey, sponsored by CARE International, an organization committed to the eradication of world poverty, is chronicled in a book that is as brief and dense as was his visit.

By Amanda Hale

Thistledown Press, 324 pages. $19.95

"There is something missing in all of us," claims Dai Ling, one of the heroines in Hornby Island writer Amanda Hale's novel, My Sweet Curiosity. And the reason we are here is "to find the missing pieces."