All Aglow
The Nature of Reading Newsletter | Fall | Week 1
Dear readers,
We’re officially one week into fall!
This past week I was reminded of one of life’s greatest joys in the colder months: to sit under a blanket (and perhaps with a heating pad), sipping tea and reading a good book. How cruel the hot summer months can be, robbing us of being cozy.
A gray mistiness prevails outside today. But in this gloomy weather, the shop shines. Warm light streams out through the windows, and the never-ending stream of passing cars can look in though the gray and catch a glimpse of everything all aglow—the outside darkness only magnifies the light within.
The orange glow of fall moves through the air around me, interlaced with lingering magic from the two beautiful evening events held here in the past week. With each book club meeting and every crafting event, I feel the strength of our community growing. Few things fulfill me more than seeing people return to the shop event after event, choosing to spend their time here and share with everyone their stories, warmth, and goodwill.
I have so much faith in the community we continue to build: faith that we will find communal joy in these ever-uncertain times, faith that we will read powerful books and make positive climate choices, and faith that we will only continue to grow with the nourishing powers of time and momentum.
I hope you’re able to stop by the shop soon to feel the magic I am lucky enough to feel everyday, whether just for a visit or for one of our upcoming evening events, which you can read more about below.
I’ll leave you for now, with the hearty suggestion that you build some coziness into your routine as the days continue to shorten and the temperatures lower.
All best wishes,
Hailey
I hope you’re able to join us for our next crafting event—in October we’ll be making this beautiful avian cross stitch pattern! As always, the kit comes with everything you need and I’ll be there to offer guidance and instruction for every step of the process. If you want to join some of the loveliest people for the coziest of evenings, I hope to see you there. You can get your ticket here.
Can you believe this year will be our third time appearing at Bottle Hill Day?! It’s Madison’s biggest festival of the year and it’s always one of the highlights of the fall season. We’ll have a booth in the center of town but we’ll also be open and stocked up with autumnal reads and gifts.
Growing up in Montana, Chris La Tray always identified as Indian. Despite the fact that his father fiercely denied any connection, he found Indigenous people alluring, often recalling his grandmother’s consistent mention of their Chippewa heritage. When La Tray attended his grandfather’s funeral as a young man, he finally found himself surrounded by relatives who obviously were Indigenous. “Who were they?” he wondered, and “Why was I never allowed to know them?” Combining diligent research and compelling conversations with authors, activists, elders, and historians, La Tray embarks on a journey into his family’s past, discovering along the way a larger story of the complicated history of Indigenous communities—as well as the devastating effects of colonialism that continue to ripple through surviving generations. And as he comes to embrace his full identity, he eventually seeks enrollment with the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians, joining their 158-year-long struggle for federal recognition.
With every passing day, and every record-breaking hurricane, it grows clearer that climate change is neither imagined nor distant—and that rising seas are transforming the coastline of the United States in irrevocable ways. In Rising, Elizabeth Rush guides readers through some of the places where this change has been most dramatic, from the Gulf Coast to Miami, and from New York City to the Bay Area. For many of the plants, animals, and humans in these places, the options are stark: retreat or perish in place. Weaving firsthand testimonials from those facing this choice with profiles of wildlife biologists, activists, and other members of these vulnerable communities, Rising privileges the voices of those too often kept at the margins.
With Mexico’s Day of the Dead festivities as a starting point, Erica decided to confront death head-on by visiting seven death festivals around the world – one for every day they didn’t find Chris. From Mexico to Nepal, Sicily, Thailand, Madagascar, Japan and finally Indonesia – with a stopover in New Orleans, where the dead outnumber the living ten to one – Erica searched for the answers to both fundamental and unexpected questions around death anxiety. This Party’s Dead is the account of her journey to understand how other cultures deal with mortal terror, how they move past the knowledge that they’re going to die in order to live happily day-to-day, how they celebrate rather than shy away from the topic of death – and how when this openness and acceptance are passed down through the generations, death suddenly doesn’t seem so scary after all.
Our three book clubs are now one: The Nature of Reading Book Club! Here, we’ll still be exploring all the latest and greatest environmental reads, and we’ll be rotating each month between fiction & non-fiction.
This October we’ll be reading the beautiful Language of Trees by Katie Holten, which is a collection of 67 excerpts from famous ecocritical works and manifestos, with each replicated into the artist/author Katie Holten’s tree alphabet, meant to help us rewild literature and ourselves. This is a visually stunning book that you really want to have in a physical copy. We’d love for you to join us to read this lovely book—you can sign up here.
For our November episode of Attending Together, we’ll be reading The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan. In case you missed our first episode discussing Mary Oliver’s Upstream, here’s the link to listen whenever you’d like.
We hope you’ll read the beautiful Backyard Bird Chronicles along with us. You can get your copy here if you’d like to pick it up at the shop, or you can order a copy for delivery through Bookshop.org.
Each week I’m going to be recommending three books each week to help us better connect with the fall season and tune into the cozy, slightly spooky vibes that begin this month.
This week we’re looking at short story collections!
First we have a wonderfully unsettling collection of dark fiction penned by Indigenous authors—with a range of tales from authors like Tommy Orange and Mona Susan Power, you’re sure to find a story that perfectly suits your feelings of fall. Next up is a new collection we got in, a vividly illustrated book of folktales from the entire North American continent. With dozens of short stories, it’s perfect to dip into before bed (if you don’t get too scared reading horror at night!). Lastly there is a spooky collection of horror stories from rural villages that span many centuries, interspersed with beautiful woodcut illustrations.
Learn more about each of the books below!
In twenty-seven wholly original and shiver-inducing tales, bestselling and award-winning Indigenous authors including Tommy Orange, Rebecca Roanhorse, Cherie Dimaline, Morgan Talty, Waubgeshig Rice, and Mona Susan Power introduce readers to ghosts, curses, hauntings, monstrous creatures, complex family legacies, desperate deeds, and chilling acts of revenge. Introduced and contextualized by bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones, these stories are a celebration of Indigenous peoples' survival and imagination, and a glorious reveling in all the things an ill-advised whistle might summon.
This beautifully illustrated book offers scary legends and folklore from Canada to Mexico and from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast, including Native American tales, settlers’ stories and African-American legends, as well as ghost stories and modern tales of cryptids. Great for campfire storytelling or as a chill-inducing gift, this is a most readable and attractive book of spooky folklore.
They stalk the moors at night, the deep forests, cornered fields and dusky churchyards, the narrow lanes and old ways of these ancient places, drawing upon the haunted landscapes of folk-horror. This richly illustrated anthology gathers together classic short stories from masters of supernatural fiction including Shirley Jackson, M. R. James, Edith Nesbit, Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sheridan Le Fanu and Arthur Machen, alongside lesser-known voices in the field including Eleanor Scott and Margery Lawrence, and popular writers less bound to the horror genre, such as Thomas Hardy and E. F. Benson. These are damnable tales, selected and beautifully illustrated by Richard Wells.
This week’s moment in nature comes from Narragansett, Rhode Island, where we celebrated my wonderful grandmother’s 80th birthday! The walk along the coast was extremely cold and windy—it was a good thing that I had my monocular to keep me distracted from the chill. There were so many seabirds to try and spot as the water swelled in massive waves! It’s always a sublime experience to see the ocean, particularly when the wind is so strong, and this was no exception.