Spreading Roots

The Nature of Reading Newsletter | Summer | Week 4

Dear readers,

We’ve had another wonderful week here at the shop!

I’ve seen so many familiar faces and met so many new members of our growing community this week. Everyday the shop feels full of a vibrant, shimmering energy that fills me with so much gratitude. I’d love to keep up this exciting pace—if you have a friend who you think would like the store, I’d so appreciate if you could tell them about it. Together, our roots spread.

I added a new section to the newsletter this week that I hope you’ll enjoy, plus there’s all of the usual book recommendations, pictures, and little ramblings. I hope you enjoyed the few days of brief respite from this crazy summer heat, and thank you all for being here and taking the time to read my newsletter and reply with all of your lovely comments.

Wishing you a wonderful weekend,

Hailey

This week we restocked the much-loved embroidery doll kits from Kiriki Press. Stop by to browse the full range of animals and pick up your next summer craft project.

It’s very exciting to announce that the first of our regular monthly crafting events sold out in less than a week! If you wanted to attend but weren’t able to grab a ticket in time, fear not—next week I’ll be announcing August’s crafting event (another evening of punch needle, perhaps?…).

1. The Wheel of the Year by Fiona Cook and Jessica Roux

A beautifully illustrated, interactive guide to ancient, nature-based holidays and customs. Through themed meditations, crafts, and rituals, young readers can learn about old and new ways of honoring the seasons—and create their own! Blending nature connection with art, poetry, and myth, The Wheel of the Year conveys the magic and beauty of ancient traditions and encourages young readers to notice, care for, and celebrate the natural world around them.

2. The Heat Will Kill you First by Jeff Goodell

The world is waking up to a new reality: wildfires are now seasonal in California, the Northeast is getting less and less snow each winter, and the ice sheets in the Arctic and Antarctica are melting fast. This aptly titled book is about the extreme ways in which our planet is already changing as summers get longer and the other seasons shorten. A heatwave, Goodell explains, is a predatory event—one that culls out the most vulnerable people. But that is changing. As heatwaves become more intense and more common, they will become more democratic. Goodell offers a vital new perspective on where we are headed, how we can prepare, and what is at stake if we fail to act.​

3. This One Wild and Precious Life by Sarah Wilson

Forty-six percent of Americans sometimes or always feel lonely, and loneliness is a public health hazard that rivals alcoholism, smoking, and obesity. Meanwhile, as our cultural sense of disconnection grows, our endless drive for “more”—more social media, more technology, overconsumption, workaholism—grows too. But what if we were to shut off our devices and simply sit with ourselves in what Wilson calls “radical aloneness?" Could this be the antidote to the profound sense of disconnection that we feel? In the voice-driven style that built a community around her last book, Wilson embarks on a personal and spiritual journey that is destined to become a movement. 

This week, if I could only recommend one book in my whole shop, I’d recommend The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.

I read this a few years ago now, but it’s been increasingly on my mind lately due to its harrowing opening scene; if you get David Wallace-Wells’ newsletter from the New York Times, you’ll have seen his mention of the book this week. The novel opens with a character’s vivid experience of a devastating heat wave, but overall the book isn’t pessimistic or doom-filled. Instead, Kim Stanley Robinson explores a range of ways to mitigate the climate crisis and adapt to the changing world. Because the book is mainly set in the very near future, it often reads like eerily prescient nonfiction, and you get to know a wide cast of characters who all relate to the environment in different ways. If you like eco- or science-fiction, I highly recommend The Ministry for the Future.

Now is the perfect time to join our book clubs for July! There’s still plenty of time before the meetings at the end of the month.

Climate Change Book Club - July 30th 2024

In 2014, Kate Schapira first set up a Peanuts style Climate Anxiety Counseling booth in her hometown of Providence, Rhode Island. Ten years and over 1200 conversations later, Schapira channels all she’s learned into an accessible, understandable, and aware guide for processing climate anxiety and connecting with others to carry out real change in your life and in your community.

Eco-fiction Book Club - July 31st 2024

Pearce Oysters is an evocative novel portraying the struggles and resilience of a Louisiana family's oyster farming business amid the 2010 oil spill crisis, highlighting the interplay of family, community, class, and industry in an overlooked region of the American South.

Nature Writing Book Club - July 25th 2024

In this blend of nature writing and memoir, artist and activist Brenda Peterson explores the wisdom humans can learn from wild animals. Filled with vivid, visionary stories of beluga whales, wolves, elk, herons, and more, Wild Chorus reveals a world filled with inspiring lessons of kinship, connection, and living in the present.

You can sign up for all of our book clubs here.

Join us virtually at 7pm on July 22nd for the summer meeting of Between The Leaves Book Club, the online book club we run with The Native Plant Society of NJ! I host with the wonderful Kim Correro, co-host of The Wild Story Podcast. This time we’ll be discussing Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden by Camille Dungy, a memoir that follows Dungy’s journey in diversifying her garden. Stop by to grab your copy, or order it here from our Bookshop.org storefront. The book club is free and open to all.

I’m introducing a new newsletter section! Each week I’ll highlight the three bestselling books from a particular category at the shop. You’ll get to see what our community likes to read most in a whole range of nature-based genres.

We’re starting off with Climate Change. This of course is one of our main areas of focus here at The Nature of Reading, so I was really curious to see which books sold the most. I often look at my data on Square to see which categories are popular, but I’ve never looked at the most popular books within a category. And so, without further ado, here are the three books in the Climate Change section that I’ve sold the most.

Top 3 Bestsellers in the Climate Change section at The Nature of Reading Bookshop

1. The Quickening by Elizabeth Rush

I was very surprised to see that this was the most popular book in the Climate Change category! It was our first ever pick for our Climate Change Book Club, but I hadn’t realized how many copies of it I’d sold after that. This beautifully written, captivating book shares Elizabeth Rush’s experience accompanying a team of scientists on humanity’s first ever journey to Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. Sharing her own reflections on climate change and motherhood, Rush also weaves in the stories of dozens of characters present on the boat with her for the lengthy weeks it takes to reach the glacier. I honestly can’t recommend this book enough, and it seems our community would agree.

2. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

I was so happy to see this one in the top three! Silent Spring was such a pivotal environmental book and it’s wonderful to see it finding resonance with a new generation of readers. Rachel Carson’s landmark book helped launch America’s modern environmental movement, forcing politicians to ban DDT and alter a number of existing policies to better serve the environment. Whether you’re revisiting Silent Spring after many years or have always been curious to read it yourself, it’s never been a better time to dive into this incredibly important book.

3. The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells

Yet another great book rounds out our top three—I’m a bit biased of course, but our community really has such great taste! This book is particularly special to me as it catalyzed my interest in environmentalism when I first read it in 2020. Until I read this book, I didn’t fully grasp just how drastically the climate would change within our lifetimes and the range of negative effects such changes would have. While it’s definitely a pretty heavy read, The Uninhabitable Earth is great for people who are just starting their journey of learning about climate change.

This week’s moment in nature comes from a family dinner at Ironbound Regenerative Farm and Cider House. I had never been to this beautiful farm before, but it took all of my willpower to stop looking at the vast array of birds and plants and flowers and go inside to actually eat dinner. Of course it was worth it in the end, because dinner was lovely and the owner came by for a chat and it felt like he was speaking my language. Between honeyed cider and finally logging a Goldfinch in my Merlin Life List, it was truly a wonderful evening.