Preparing for the Holidays
The Nature of Reading Newsletter | Fall | Week 10
Dear readers,
I’m back with another quick note today after a whirlwind of a week inventorying dozens of new books and holiday gift items at the shop. Really, this was how the shop looked each day after the UPS man arrived:
As soon as we’d clear a round of boxes, the next would come in! But now that most everything has been inventoried and stored away (somewhat) neatly, I can get back to some bigger tasks as the holiday season begins to really set in.
One of these tasks involves next week’s newsletter, which will be a gift guide filled with hand-picked recommendations for all the nature and book lovers in your life. I’ve been dividing the recommendations by hobbies/interests, such as what to get a birder, a gardener, a crafter, and more. Do you have any people or types of people you’d like recommendations for? Leave a comment below or reply to this email, and I might include it in the gift guide!
It’s already time to dive back into the depths of holiday planning, but I hope you are having the most lovely weekend and that I’ll see you at the shop sometime soon. Oh! And I’d love to see you at our punch needle crafting event this Thursday—it’s the perfect way to kick off the holiday season. Our felting event for Tuesday has sold out already, but there are still spots available for Thursday and we’d love for you to join us.
All best wishes,
Hailey
A kind customer has organized a food drive for Morris County’s Interfaith Food Pantry, and we’ll be collecting non-perishable food items on an ongoing basis. Check here to see what the food pantry is most in need of, and feel free to drop off any donations you might have during open hours at the shop.
We’re not just bringing back needle felting, we’re also bringing back punch needle! I couldn’t decide between these three sweet kits, so you’ll get to choose your favorite (though there are only 4 of each pattern available, so make sure to reserve yours sooner rather than later!). After learning the basics of punch needle, you can likely finish your project by the end of our event, something that is somewhat rare for fiber arts crafts! Even if you don’t finish, you’ll go home with the full beautifully packaged kit, equipped with all the knowledge and tools you’ll need to finish the project.
We’re closing out the month with Small Business Saturday! Come by the shop that day for a variety of specials, giveaways, and our once-a-year sale where we put out all the slightly damaged books that we’ve received from publishers at a steep discount. I’ll keep you updated about the festivities we have planned for the day, but I just wanted to say thank you so much for your support during these tumultuous times—your continued patronage of the store, through buying books and gifts and event tickets, is what allows me to stay open and keep going despite all the general uncertainty facing our country. Thank you so much, and I hope to see you soon.
The Water Remembers: My Indigenous Family’s Fight to Save a River and a Way of Life by Amy Bowers Cordalis
For the members of a Northern California tribe, salmon are the lifeblood of the people—a vital source of food, income, and cultural identity. When a catastrophic fish kill devastates the river, Amy Bowers Cordalis is propelled into action, reigniting her family’s 170-year battle against the U.S. government. In a moving and engrossing blend of memoir and history, Cordalis propels readers through generations of her family’s struggle, where she learns that the fight for survival is not only about fishing—it’s about protecting a way of life and the right of a species and river to exist. Her great-uncle’s landmark Supreme Court case reaffirming her Nation’s rights to land, water, fish, and sovereignty, her great-grandmother’s defiant resistance during the Salmon Wars, and her family’s ongoing battles against government overreach shape the deep commitment to justice that drives Cordalis forward. When the source of the fish kill is revealed, Cordalis steps up as General Counsel for the Yurok Tribe to hold powerful corporate interests accountable, and to spearhead the largest river restoration project in history. The Water Remembers is a testament to the enduring power of Indigenous knowledge, family legacy, and the determination to ensure that future generations remember what it means to live in balance with the earth.
Celebrate the rich, global traditions of storytelling with this vibrant collection of nature-based tales from around the world! From Mexico and Denmark, Siberia and Greece, to Finland, Japan, and India, this stunning illustrated collection of nineteen stories is an ode to the natural world and its living creatures, plants, and magical beings that make up celebrated folklore around the globe.
As a civil engineer, Sangamithra Iyer knows about resilience from studying soils and water. As an animal rights activist, she advocates for a revolution in how we value and relate to other species. And as the child of immigrants from India, she searches for submerged histories. Animated by a series of questions—How do we disentangle ourselves from systems of harm? Is it possible to grasp the scale of planetary sorrow and emerge with truth and love as our guides, rather than despair? What is the relationship between individual action and systemic change?—this memoir takes the form of three meandering rivers, each written as a letter. Addressing the first of them to her grandfather, Iyer assembles the story of a man who embraced Gandhi’s philosophy and went to work developing wells in Tamil Nadu. In a second letter, addressed to her father, she explores their shared interest in cultivating compassion for all beings. And then in a final letter, addressed to readers, she braids these explorations of her familial past with her own experiences as a woman of color and citizen of the world, always seeking ways to move beyond resignation and restore flow. A lyrical story of lineages and an urgently needed reckoning with the ways bodies are both controlled and liberated, Governing Bodies is a timeless work with profoundly timely relevance.
We’re back with the next installment of The Nature of Reading Book Club! This month we’re reading Priyanka Kumar’s latest book, The Light Between Apple Trees: Rediscovering the Wild Through a Beloved American Fruit. Though the tidiness of orchards and the dozens of neat piles of apples at every supermarket seem far from what we think of as the wild, Kumar takes us on a journey through the hidden world of wild apples trees and the rich, diverse history of apples. This is a particularly exciting month to join book club, as we’ll be having a variety of apple treats during the meeting to help us better enjoy the book discussion! Get your ticket for the book club meeting (the ticket is just the price of the book and includes the book and everything else listed at the link!) and pick up the book at the shop or have it shipped to you.
We’ve been on a break due to the shop move, but fear not—Attending Together will be resuming soon with the release of our discussion of Jenny Odell’s works! Order your copies of How to Do Nothing and Saving Time and read along with us.
In times like these, we could all use some grounding. Detaching from political news and reading about rocks is the perfect thing to bring you back to Earth, literally and figuratively! Check out these three beautiful reads below as you begin your own deep time journeys.
The epic stories of our planet’s 4.54-billion-year history are written in strata—ages-old remnants of ancient seafloors, desert dunes and riverbeds striping canyon walls and cliffsides all around us. These layers of rock help geologists piece together how our planet became the place we know and gather context for modern change. In Strata, Laura Poppick travels across the globe to show us how to decipher these primeval plotlines. Digging into four moments of transformation that shaped Earth and made our lives possible—from the first accumulations of oxygen in the atmosphere to the deep freeze of “Snowball Earth”, the rise of mud on land and the dinosaurs’ reign on a hothouse planet—we see how the arc of geologic time bends toward stability. Beautifully grounding and laced with awe, Strata unveils the wisdom and hope for our times these rocks can hold.
Earth has been reinventing itself for more than four billion years, keeping a record of its experiments in the form of rocks. Yet most of us live our lives on the planet with no idea of its extraordinary history, unable to interpret the language of the rocks that surround us. Geologist Marcia Bjornerud believes that our lives can be enriched by understanding our heritage on this old and creative planet. Contrary to their reputation, rocks have eventful lives–and they intersect with our own in surprising ways. In Turning to Stone, Bjornerud reveals how rocks are the hidden infrastructure that keep the planet functioning, from sandstone aquifers purifying the water we drink to basalt formations slowly regulating global climate. Bjornerud’s life as a geologist has coincided with an extraordinary period of discovery in the geosciences. From an insular girlhood in rural Wisconsin, she found her way to an unlikely career studying mountains in remote parts of the world and witnessed the emergence of a new understanding of the Earth as an animate system of rock, air, water and life. We are all, most fundamentally, Earthlings and we can find existential meaning and enduring wisdom in stone.
In The Whispers of Rock, earth scientist Anjana Khatwa asks us to think again and listen to their stories. Boldly alternating between modern science and ancient wisdom, Khatwa takes us on an exhilarating journey through deep time, from origins of the green pounamu that courses down New Zealand rivers to the wonder of the bluestone megaliths of Stonehenge, from the tuff-hewn churches of Lalibela, Ethiopia, to Manhattan’s bedrock of schist. In unearthing those stories and more, Khatwa shows how rocks have always spoken to us, and we humans to them. She delicately intertwines Indigenous stories of Earth’s creation with our scientific understanding of its development, deftly showing how our lives are intimately connected to time’s ancient storytellers. Through tales of planetary change, ancient wisdom, and contemporary creativity, The Whispers of Rock offers the hope of reconnection with Earth. With Khatwa as your guide, you won’t simply hear rocks speak--you, too, will feel the magic of deep time seep into your bones.