Editor’s Note: Features new books that are either by Maine authors, set in the Pine Tree State or have other local ties.

Steve Perrin is a Bar Harbor retiree who enjoys quiet marathon hikes; Stephen Gorman is a Vermont adventurer who seeks out high-octane wilderness.

But the two authors’ new books share the same soul. Both seek to describe their intangible conversations with nature, and in doing so, perhaps convert a few readers to their passion.

Gorman’s “Northeastern Wilds: Journeys of Discovery in the Northern Forest” is, first and foremost, a beautiful book to flip through.

The best of author and photographer Gorman’s images of New England make the familiar seem exotic, like a landscape from National Geographic that you love because it’s out of reach. The worst seem like advertisements for a tourism bureau. In whole, the photographs give a feeling of hidden wonders in our back yard.

The meat of the book attempts to do the same in vignettes about different parts of the northern forest. Some explore the region’s history ad nauseam and some touch on the politics of logging and wilderness protection, but where Gorman shines is in the first-person accounts of his adventures.

You can be an armchair tourist and feel Gorman’s excitement just reading the book, though after a few chapters, your mind wanders to plans for seeing these places with your own eyes.

A second printing of Steve Perrin’s “Acadia: The Soul of a National Park” is little changed – if at all – from the 1998 debut that became a bible for eastern Maine hikers. Perrin’s descriptions of Acadia’s vast network of hiking trails are like nothing in a guidebook, with their descriptions of the animal and plant life that Perrin encounters in his ramblings over Mount Desert Island.

At 320 crowded pages, “Acadia” is intimidating, but it’s the sort of book that you can dip into as the mood strikes, reading Perrin’s musings by season or by trail. Even a speed-reader can’t digest this book in a single sitting because after about 10 pages you’ll want to throw it on the couch and go for a hike – which is perhaps its greatest strength.

“Hiking the living trails of Acadia puts me in touch with what I am not, with all that makes life possible, with my companions on the journey of life,” Perrin writes. “Hiking grounds me, reminding me that life is an ongoing event … The universe never rests … get moving, it tells us, get out and about.”