Welcome back to another events newsletter. There’s a lot coming up on the calendar this month, and I can’t wait to share it all with you.

I hope you’re able to join us at one of our events this month and beyond. Either way, I’ll be back in your inbox very soon with nature pictures from our trip to Maine and more ramblings about my current fascinations in books, nature, and creativity.

Without further ado, I’ll let you explore our upcoming events and our August bestsellers below.

All best wishes,

Hailey

sign up here

For our next meeting for Seeds & Reads Book Club, which we run with one of our most favorite local groups, Grow it Green Morristown, we’ll be reading How to Fall in Love with the Future by Rob Hopkins. This hopeful book will fill you with climate optimism and the desire to build a better future for our planet and all its inhabitants. Looking through examples of transformative movements in human history and diving into case studies of solarpunk happenings today, Rob Hopkins helps us imagine a future without the weight of climate doomism. The book club is free and open to all (though we might fill up available seats very soon!) — just click here to sign up so we know how many chairs to set out. We hope you can join us to read and discuss this amazing book!

I’m finally starting something that’s been on my list of event dreams for a while: a mending night at the shop that is free and open to all! Join us on the evening of September 15th and bring any garment you’ve been meaning to mend for a while but never quite seem to get around to it. It’s bring your own project and mending materials, but I’ll see if I can scrounge up some extra needles and thread, and I’m happy to share any of my limited sewing knowledge! I don’t have a signup page set up yet, but if you could just send me a quick reply to this email letting me know that you’re interested, that would be great - that way, I know how much space to clear at the shop!

get your ticket here

Sometimes you’re scrolling through your vendors’ wholesale shops and you stop dead in your tracks: what on earth is that—a mini dragon?! Smaller than the palm of one’s hand? I knew immediately that this was going to be the crafting event for September. The dragons are simply too whimsical! We’ve been carrying DelilahIris kits for a while, but she just recently released these and they’re too sweet. Of course, I couldn’t decide between the five colors, so you can pick your favorite to make at the event. We only have a few of each color though, so make sure to reserve yours now if you’d like to join us to make a dragon fleet!

get your ticket here

At The Nature of Reading Book Club, this month we’ll be reading Beasts of the Sea by Iida Turpeinen. I saw this book again recently in a little bookstore in Maine, and when I started reading the back cover, I remembered why it intrigued me so much when I spotted it in one of the many publisher catalogues I flipped through last fall. Beasts of the Sea is a work of historical eco-fiction centered on one particular beast: Steller’s Sea Cow. Through a unique birds-eye view narration (the book is translated from Finnish) we see humanity grappling with nature and human-caused extinction over three centuries. If you love historical fiction, natural history, the ocean, or just animals in general, I think you’d greatly enjoy this book and I’d love for you to join us for book club this month.

Check out below for events that’ll be taking place after September.

Somehow, Bottle Hill Day is nearly here! Mark your calendars for Madison’s biggest yearly festival. More details to come on our specific pop-up location, but you can be sure you’ll find us at the shop and in our pop-up booth carrying a whole range of nature & autumnal reads.

The second collaborative book club we run is The ArboReaders, a book club with the wonderful Cora Hartshorn Arboretum. For the fall season we’re reading Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless by Maria Pinto. We’d love for you to join us to discuss this somewhat spooky nature read, especially if haven’t visited the Cora Hartshorn Arboretum yet (it is the epitome of a magical place). The book club is free and open to all — we just ask people to register in advance so we know how many people to expect. We haven’t set up our November registration page yet, but just reply to this email if you’d like to join The ArboReaders and I’ll add your name to the list!

This new section features some of the best-selling items/categories at the bookshop last month.

Best-selling Nature Book: Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard

This is such a wonderful book—I reread it this year before reading Simard’s latest book, When the Forest Breathes. In both, Simard beautifully blends her own life story with tales of her scientific discoveries and her many years of advocating for trees and forests.

Best-selling Category of Nature Books: Nature Guides

An encouraging statistic! It seems people were getting outside even more than usual to make the most of August’s summery weather. We have a wide selection of nature guides on different topics, and we’re always happy to make any custom recommendations in areas you’re specifically looking for.

Best-selling Gift Item: Little Critterz

Technically this is both an item and a category as I don’t keep a stock count on each individual animal, but look at these beautiful miniatures! These have long been a customer favorite and in the new shop we expanded to 4 spice-racks on the wall packed full of the sweetest mini ceramic animals. We only sell these in-store, so stop by if you’d like to see them for yourself!

Best-selling Gift Category: Raaka Chocolate

Another early vendor we worked with at the shop is Raaka Chocolate. Their chocolate is vegan, ethically made, allergen-free, and delicious! They care so much about every stage of the chocolate-making process and each bar shows that care. Plus they’re always coming out with the most unique flavors! Stop by the shop to pick up full-size bars and minis.

Happy Sunday and welcome back to another newsletter!

This newsletter will be quite brief as Mario and I are in Maine for a little vacation! If you were wanting to visit the shop soon, fear not – our team of amazing booksellers is keeping everything at The Nature of Reading running for the next week (we’ll have our same hours, just closing at 5pm instead of 6pm on weekdays). Do stop by to see them – you’ll catch Jo, Alison, Sarah, or my mom at various points this week.

Hopefully I can get some more fun bird photos to share as I did last summer. I’ll certainly try my best, though my photography skills are rusty! I am really looking forward to disconnecting a bit this week and spending time exploring midcoast Maine, visiting our favorite Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens, reading, writing, and reflecting on a busy year.

You’ll hear from me next at the end of August with news of our September events. I hope you too are enjoying these late summer days, and I hope you’ll visit the shop and keep our booksellers company in my absence!

All best wishes,

Hailey

join us for book club

At The Nature of Reading Book Club, this month we’re be reading The Earth Said Remember Me: How to Revive our Memories and Restore the Planet by Jason Dove Mark. The book focuses on shifting baseline syndrome, which in regard to the nature means “the gradual shifting of the accepted norm when it comes to the condition of natural places.” In this way, we often fail to realize the extent of what we’ve lost. Jason Dove Mark seeks to remedy this ecological amnesia through four action steps: Go Outside, Bear Witness, Make a Record, Pass it On. Learn more about shifting baseline syndrome and using our imagination to remember a richer ecological past and construct a better future for our planet by joining us at book club this month.

get your ticket here

I’ve always loved folk art styles, and when I saw these bookmarks from Avlea Folk Embroidery I knew I’d love to make them for a crafting event. They feel so cozy to me, with their rich color palette and warm fabric backgrounds, and I know they’ll make a perfect stitching project for the end of August as we transition from summer into fall. Whether you’ve cross stitched before or are a complete beginner, I’m happy to help all levels of crafters get started on these sweet cross-stitch bookmarks as we sip soothing cups of herbal tea. Grab a friend and join us for this wholesome evening of crafting, tea, and great company.

sign up here

For our next meeting for Seeds & Reads Book Club, which we run with one of our most favorite local groups, Grow it Green Morristown, we’ll be reading How to Fall in Love with the Future by Rob Hopkins. This hopeful book will fill you with climate optimism and the desire to build a better future for our planet and all its inhabitants. Looking through examples of transformative movements in human history and diving into case studies of solarpunk happenings today, Rob Hopkins helps us imagine a future without the weight of climate doomism. The book club is free and open to all — just click here to sign up so we know how many chairs to set out. We hope you can join us to read and discuss this amazing book!

1. The Savage Landscape by Cal Flyn

Wilderness is a powerful, ancient concept, lying at the intersection of landscape, philosophy, and ecology. And for thousands of years, people have sought out uncontrolled, unknown, or uncharted nature in search of religious epiphany, self-actualization, and an escape from modern life. More recently these “pristine” places have been seen as the subject of a last effort to repair a planet imperiled by humans. But as award-winning writer Cal Flyn traverses the most forbidding, untamed and inhospitable wild lands—the supposedly uninhabited wilds of the world—she finds that such truly untouched lands don't exist: Nearly every wilderness has been or is actively inhabited by humans. The Savage Landscape takes us into these breathtaking wilds—deep into dark forests, to the tops of mountains, and into the hearts of deserts—asking provocative questions about the nature of wilderness, its preservation, and its meaning.

2. The Wild Beneath by Kelly Anderson

Annie MacLeod always knew she was different, growing up on a sailboat in the Pacific Northwest, navigating by stars and swimming with sea creatures alongside her parents and best friend Evan. After tsunami shatters her world, Annie is stranded on land, where she rescues a wordless man named Walker, who emits a hum only she can hear. Even as she is pulled toward Walker, Evan—the steadfast love who has always been there—remains on dry land, offering the stability she may have to leave behind. But then, Walker vanishes, along with the answers she needs about who she really is. Six years later, Annie has left the sea and buried the past—until Walker returns, pulling her back toward the ocean and the life she abandoned. The truth under the water is more ancient than she ever could have known, and Annie must confront a choice that will test her heart and determine her future.

3. A Tree by Onomatopee

A Tree: A Reader on Arboreal Kinship showcases research and works in which artists explore the relationship between people and trees and ways we can relate more closely to their time span. A Tree is about vegetal agency, plant knowledge and the interaction between plants and people. The aim of this reader is to nurture and encourage dialogues and to share inspiration on exercising arboreal kinship by taking the time to think about trees differently.

The newsletter this week is a real collaborative effort! I asked Mario if he wanted to say a few words for the notes from the community garden section this week.

Hi! I am Mario – from the middle picture above!

I love our community garden plot. I have spent many hours making sure all of our plants are well pruned, weeded, and watered. I love all the plants the same, but I need to say, one of the most exciting things we’ve been growing this year is luffa plants!

If—just as I did—you thought loofahs were some sort of sea produce, then at least you know you are not alone. When Hailey said that she wanted to try to grow loofahs this year, I couldn’t believe that they weren’t some sort of ocean sponge rather than a squash. But of course (as always) she proved me wrong!

So now, we are growing two really beautiful luffa plants, with more luffas appearing on the vines every week. The first luffa that grew was so heavy that it caved in our trellis archway and it almost hit the ground! Luckily, we were able to use a couple of long support sticks to hold it up.

It’s been so fun to see the leaves cover our trellis archway, and to have the luffas hit our heads every time we walk under the archway and into the center of our garden.

We will be sure to show you the final product once their growing season ends and they fully dry out, ready to be turned into bath loofahs or dish sponges. And if we’re lucky enough to have many large luffas grow, you may even get to see some loofah sponges in the shop one day!

We were lucky enough to have our bookseller Jo here for another summer before she starts her senior year! In honor of her return to Smith at the end of the month, I asked her to pick three books she’s most looking forward to reading this fall. We’ll miss you Jo but we know you’ll have an amazing fall semester!

1. John of John by Douglas Stuart

If you’ve spoken to my dad recently, you’ll know he hasn’t stopped talking about the week we spent road tripping through Scotland together. On that trip, we got to spend a few days on the Isle of Skye and it was nothing short of magical. While John of John is largely set on the Isle of Harris, rather than Skye, I’m hoping this story on the islands of Scotland will remind me of that trip. I also loved Douglas Stuart’s past two novels, so I have no doubt I’ll enjoy this one. Plus, it’s up for the Booker this year and I always like to sample a few of their choices.

2. Pastoral Song by James Rebanks

When we read The Place of Tides for book club last August, I fell in love with Rebanks’ writing. In fact, that was my favorite book we’ve read for book club so far! In The Place of Tides, Rebanks frequently references his time as a farmer, so when I saw he had a book about it, I knew I had to read it. Pastoral Song follows James Rebanks as he inherits his English family farm and set out to restore the land there. I love the vivid and beautiful way Rebanks describes landscapes and rural life, so I’m excited to see him do it again.

3. The Annual Migration of Clouds by Premee Mohamed

Technically, I already read Premee Mohamed’s The Annual Migration of Clouds in the Spring, but I get to revisit it this Fall because it’s one of the books I’m writing my senior thesis on! My quick pitch for this book is always that it’s like The Last of Us but with a sentient fungus the host (or human) cohabitates with. But it’s also so much more than that. Mohamed’s novel looks at what it means to build community in the wake of collapse and the way that care dynamics change and evolve after and within disaster. This story is also just the first in a trilogy, so I can’t wait to read the next two books as well.

Happy August! It’s been a little while since I sent out an events newsletter, a habit I’m happy to return to this month!

As we’re in the depths of summer, there’s not too much on the calendar for the month, but we do have our usual monthly book club and crafting event to look forward to.

Without further ado, I’ll let you explore our upcoming events (and a couple fun new sections) below.

All best wishes,

Hailey

get your ticket here

At The Nature of Reading Book Club, this month we’ll be reading The Earth Said Remember Me: How to Revive our Memories and Restore the Planet by Jason Dove Mark. The book focuses on shifting baseline syndrome, which in regard to the nature means “the gradual shifting of the accepted norm when it comes to the condition of natural places.” In this way, we often fail to realize the extent of what we’ve lost. Jason Dove Mark seeks to remedy this ecological amnesia through four action steps: Go Outside, Bear Witness, Make a Record, Pass it On. Learn more about shifting baseline syndrome and using our imagination to remember a richer ecological past and construct a better future for our planet by joining us at book club this month.

get your ticket here

I’ve always loved folk art styles, and when I saw these bookmarks from Avlea Folk Embroidery I knew I’d love to make them for a crafting event. They feel so cozy to me, with their rich color palette and warm fabric backgrounds, and I know they’ll make a perfect stitching project for the end of August as we transition from summer into fall. Whether you’ve cross stitched before or are a complete beginner, I’m happy to help all levels of crafters get started on these sweet cross-stitch bookmarks as we sip soothing cups of herbal tea. Grab a friend and join us for this wholesome evening of crafting, tea, and great company.

I’ve put together a new little section so we can highlight our collaborative book clubs and other joint events that are planned a bit further out! Checkout below for events that’ll be taking place after August.

For our next meeting for Seeds & Reads Book Club, which we run with one of our most favorite local groups, Grow it Green Morristown, we’ll be reading How to Fall in Love with the Future by Rob Hopkins. This hopeful book will fill you with climate optimism and the desire to build a better future for our planet and all its inhabitants. Looking through examples of transformative movements in human history and diving into case studies of solarpunk happenings today, Rob Hopkins helps us imagine a future without the weight of climate doomism. The book club is free and open to all — just click here to sign up so we know how many chairs to set out. We hope you can join us to read and discuss this amazing book!

The second collaborative book club we run is The ArboReaders, a book club with the wonderful Cora Hartshorn Arboretum. For the fall season we’re reading Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless by Maria Pinto. We’d love for you to join us to discuss this somewhat spooky nature read, especially if haven’t visited the Cora Hartshorn Arboretum yet (it is the epitome of a magical place). The book club is free and open to all — we just ask people to register in advance so we know how many people to expect. We just had our summer meeting last night so we’re still setting up fall’s registration page, but just reply to this email if you’d like to join The ArboReaders and I’ll add your name to the list!

Another new section! I thought it would be fun to look back at some of the best-selling items/categories at the bookshop last month.

Best-selling Category of Nature Books: Eco-fiction

One of our favorite genres! Eco-fiction is an emerging genre of books that explore the natural world and our relationship to nature.

Best-selling Nature Book: The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Since Robin Wall Kimmerer is one of our top three best-selling authors at the shop, this didn’t surprise me! Everything she writes is suffused with a deep care and love for our planet. In The Serviceberry, she uses the plant to demonstrate themes of abundance and reciprocity in nature, and reflects on how our society would be freer without a scarcity mindset.

Best-selling Gift Item: Fern + Moss Candle from Brooklyn Candle Studio

It’s our shop’s signature scent! We have a plug-in diffuser that we use at the shop with the Fern + Moss scent, both of which we just started carrying in-store and online because they were finally available for wholesale! Whether you prefer plug-in diffusers or candles, we have several different forms of this delightful, relaxing scent for you to explore at the shop (plus a few other candle scents from Brooklyn Candle Studio).

Best-selling Gift Category: Canyon & Cove Art

Canyon & Cove Art by Megan Nielsen in Sisters, Oregon makes some of our favorite products. We love her wooden bookmarks, whimsical vinyl stickers, die-cut wrap stickers, and delightful prints. Stop by the shop to checkout our range of the sweetest animal stationery or browse online here.

Welcome back to another newsletter—I hope you’re all doing alright during this hot, stormy month and at the end of this smoky, stormy week. Personally, I’m clinging to the silver lining that these manifestations of extreme weather events have at least (hopefully) sparked more widespread conversations about the climate crisis and our changing world.

Recently, I’ve been trying to train my mind away from viewing (or perhaps hoping to see) my life as a linear progression that moves ever upward. Working in climate circles, I’ve long embraced that this isn’t, or cannot be, the case for our planet, where humanity’s idea of progress is predicated on endless extraction of a limited supply of natural sources.

But it’s harder when looking inward, when I try to shake the notion of my life as always growing, moving forward, expanding. Even with decent stores of self-awareness, I still find myself craving simple narrative structures, especially when it comes to battles within – I’d like to write my story in the past tense, that I fought hard against my inner difficulties, that it was a long and messy time, but in the end, I came out on the other side stronger for it. Instead, it stings when I find my upward path taking a turn, when I walk past the bend and return to familiar ground.

It feels like it’s been a while since I’ve written so cryptically, but I’m in the process of easing the building pressure of not acknowledging that sometimes, with lifelong struggles, there is backsliding and a need to acknowledge a growing distance between current and ideal self.

This summer, I’m trying to better acclimate to these cycles within my life. I’m giving myself more quiet time, even if I don’t, or can’t, accomplish everything I’d like.

Even within this quiet, I long to share news and updates with you, dear reader! There is still much reflection, pondering, and journaling that I wish to undertake as the summer swells, but I wanted to let you all know about some exciting upcoming events with the shop and share a bit of my thoughts with you.

I hope to see you soon at the shop in these quiet summer months, or you’ll soon hear from me again in the next newsletter.

All best wishes,

Hailey

join us for book club

We’d love for you to join us for our next meeting of The Nature of Reading Book Club. This month, we’re reading Move Like Water by Hannah Stowe. Sometimes we like to dip into the backlist during the summer to find a book that feels properly “summery” (seasonal reading in action!) and this July I wanted to imagine being beside the ocean (ideally the North Sea, along the coast of the British Isles, the landscape a palette of rich green hills, earthy brown cliffs, and choppy, wine-dark seas). Join us to read Hannah’s memoir of growing up by the sea before becoming a sailor and marine biologist. Combining her personal narrative with the stories of six keystone marine creatures, Stowe invites us readers to fall in love, as she has, with the sea and those that call it home.

get your ticket here

Keeping with the aquatic theme, this month’s crafting event features these fun felt fishes! Sheep Creek Studio, the amazing artist who makes the moths, ornaments, and banners that we’ve done for needle felting events in the past, just released several new delightful kits. There are certainly more where this came from, but July seemed like a perfect time to make these bright, summery fish - I hope the event will bring some light in at the end of a stormy month.

sign up here

If you’ve ever thought that monthly meetings are too frequent for you to join The Nature of Reading Book Club, you’ll love these next two book clubs! First up we have The ArboReaders, the book club I run with the Cora Hartshorn Arboretum. For the summer season we’re reading Night Magic by Leigh Ann Henion - a favorite here at the shop - and we’ll be meeting at the Arboretum in the evening to hopefully spot some fireflies! If you read Night Magic for our other programming last year, we’d love for you to join us for this event, especially if haven’t visited the Cora Hartshorn Arboretum yet (it is the epitome of a magical place). Also, if you’re curious about nature at night but won’t have time to read the book, feel free to join us! I’ll have copies of the book for sale that evening if you’d like to read it after our discussions. The book club is free and open to all — just click here to sign up so we know how many people to expect. We hope to see you there for a truly magical night!

sign up here

For our next meeting for Seeds & Reads Book Club, which we run with one of our most favorite local groups, Grow it Green Morristown, we’ll be reading How to Fall in Love with the Future by Rob Hopkins. This hopeful book will fill you with climate optimism and the desire to build a better future for our planet and all its inhabitants. Looking through examples of transformative movements in human history and diving into case studies of solarpunk happenings today, Rob Hopkins helps us imagine a future without the weight of climate doomism. The book club is free and open to all — just click here to sign up so we know how many chairs to set out. We hope you can join us to read and discuss this amazing book!

1. Country People by Daniel Mason

Miles Krzelewski is a devoted husband, a doting father beloved for his outlandish bedtime stories, and the proud owner of a truffle-hunting dog in a land with no truffles. He is also a bit lost, so when his wife Kate accepts a visiting professorship at a prestigious college in the far away forests of Vermont, he decides that this will be his year to finally move forward with his life. But no sooner does he arrive than he finds himself entangled with a cast of characters as colorful as any of the folktales from his ongoing PhD project. The new friends, the enchanted woods, the histories: sure, no PhD, but all good fun. Until Miles stumbles upon a bizarre—perhaps ridiculous— local legend, which, he soon suspects, might not be just a legend after all. Joyous, absurd, and life-affirming, Country People is a luminous exploration of marriage and parenthood, the nature of belief and the power of stories, and the ways in which we find connection in an increasingly fragmented world.

2. Remembering Earth by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

Remembering Earth blends reflection with practical guidance, exploring how remembrance, prayer, praise, and intimacy with Earth can restore our sacred relationship with the living world. Through a variety of practices in six key areas—Breath, Heart, Step, Listening, Time, and Prayer—the book guides you to an experience of radical belonging. Each practice is a doorway, inviting you from concept to communion, from observer to participant in the sacred web of life, offering an embodied spiritual ecology that moves beyond ideas into lived experience. In a time of great unraveling, Remembering Earth offers an embodied, spiritual path of remembrance and kinship, guiding us back to the sacredness of creation and our place within the more-than-human world.

3. A Perpetual Journal Practice by Lara Call Gastinger

Through this gorgeous, encouraging book, with a thoughtful foreword by trusted and beloved author and ecologist Doug Tallamy, Lara guides readers, nature lovers, and artists through this rich and mindful practice, further illuminated by a breathtaking, up-close-and-personal look into 52 of her own full-page journal spreads, lovingly built over many years. From how to number each page spread in a fresh, blank journal, to tips on bringing those blank pages to life, to soothing the concerns of those who are unsure they can connect in such a way with their natural environments or their own power of expression, A Perpetual Journal Practice is a powerful book for naturalists seeking a deepened and more personal understanding of nature, artists seeking to improve their skills, and those seeking to heal and grow in all the green spaces.

We haven’t made it out to our community garden plot too much in the last few days given the stormy weather and the wildfire smoke, but here are some snapshots from the last couple of weeks of beautiful pollinators visiting our plants! Every time I see a bees or ladybugs traveling through our plot, it fills me with an almost unnerving joy. We’re heading back to the garden today to check on everything after yesterdays thunderstorms—a lot of delightful things had just starting blossoming/fruiting the last time we stopped by, so I know I’ll have much to share with you in the next newsletter.

If you’d like to learn more about the bees and insects you’re seeing out and about visiting all the flowers this season, these are some great books we’d highly recommend to learn more about pollinators.

1. Bees by Heather Holm

A comprehensive guide illustrating the bees that occur in north-central and eastern United States and southern Canada and the native plants that support them. Bees includes in-depth profiles of 27 common and 12 common genera of bees, covering the life cycles, habitats, diet, foraging behaviors, crops pollinated, nesting lifestyles, seasonality, and preferred native forage plants. Holm also features a native plant library featuring 100 native trees, shrubs, and perennials that support bees in the Midwest, Great Lakes, and Northeast regions.

2. Our Native Bees by Paige Embry

Honey bees get all the press, but the fascinating story of North America’s native bees—endangered species essential to our ecosystems and food supplies—is just as crucial. Through interviews with farmers, gardeners, scientists, and bee experts, Our Native Bees explores the importance of native bees and focuses on why they play a key role in gardening and agriculture. The people and stories are compelling: Paige Embry goes on a bee hunt with the world expert on the likely extinct Franklin’s bumble bee, raises blue orchard bees in her refrigerator, and learns about an organization that turns the out-of-play areas in golf courses into pollinator habitats. Our Native Bees is a fascinating, must-read for fans of natural history and science and anyone curious about bees.

3. Attracting Native Pollinators by The Xerces Society

A complete action plan to protect bees, wasps, butterflies, moths, flies, and some beetles by providing flowering habitat and nesting sites. With the recent decline of the European honey bee, it is more important than ever to encourage the activity of other native pollinators to keep your flowers beautiful and your grains and produce plentiful. In Attracting Native Pollinators, you’ll find ideas for building nesting structures and creating a welcoming habitat for an array of diverse pollinators that includes not only bees, but butterflies, moths, and more. Take action and protect North America’s food supply for the future, while at the same time enjoying a happily bustling landscape.

Hello once again, and hello to all of our new subscribers from the NJ Bookstore Crawl and beyond! If you enjoy somewhat frazzled ramblings, nature book recommendations, and behind the scenes looks at the beauty and mild chaos of running a bookstore, you’ve come to the right place.

I need to start with an earnest and profound thank you: the support you all have shown the shop in the last few weeks has truly blown me away. Through the NJ Bookstore Crawl and beyond, I met so many wonderful readers and heard just the kindest things about the shop and all I’ve poured into it.

I’m so grateful to have had the privilege of making a space where people can come and feel calm and safe surrounded by the manifestations of our shared love of nature, books, and crafts, where people can talk about their own eco-journeys without fear of judgement and discuss our collective hope for a better future.

Thank you to the countless new customers who have visited the shop this month, and thank you to all the returning readers who have shown The Nature of Reading such loyal and kindhearted support for all these years. I truly would never have gotten to this point without you all.

A new energy shimmers at the shop—it’s as though I can feel the roots spreading beneath the floorboards, anchoring us to this place and sending out signals for others who care deeply for each other and our planet to stop by. As always, I’m filled to the brim with ideas of what else I’d like to do with the shop and the space, and now as we enter the summer months and a quieter event period for us, it seems like the perfect time to dig deep and bring further magics to the surface.

But that’s looking forward—first, I’d love to look back and show you some of the busy weeks we’ve had at the shop since I last wrote to you.

Knowing that people would be traveling from all over the state to visit the shop during the NJ Bookstore Crawl, we wanted to put our best face forward. Thankfully the native plants in front of the shop have been thriving since we filled their pots a couple months back—it’s our own little garden right outside the door. Then, I filled the window’s book vases with the sweetest felt flowers, with the hope that their bright colors would draw the eyes of passerby. (How lovely it has been to look out the window and see so many people stopping to take photos of the shop and saying the nicest things to each other!)

The Bookstore Crawl was also good motivation for me to get several projects done that I’d been meaning to bring to life for a while. Filling the walls with prints, birdhouses, and native plant signs has added much joy and color to the space.

During the Bookstore Crawl itself, I never managed to snap any photos of our wonderful visitors, but here are some pictures my mom took when she stopped by to drop off some lightbulbs after an emergency run (our savior!).

Saturday of the Crawl was our busiest day ever at the shop, and I couldn’t have asked for better, more curious and kinder visitors than those I met that day.

After three long days at the crawl, we had another amazing event with the Madison Environmental Commission, a celebration of trees and forests in honor of Suzanne Simard’s new book, When the Forest Breathes.

It was one of my favorite events yet, with fascinating presentations from Kirsten Wallenstein about the Madison Conservation Forest and from Susan Landau about creating your very own pocket forest in your yard.

If you’d like to receive the resources from this presentation, just reply to this email and we’ll add your name to the list for when we send out the resource email next week (if you had already registered for the event, there’s no need to let me know—we’ve got your email on our list!).

The prep for the talk and especially the Bookstore Crawl were all I could think about for weeks leading up to them, so much so that I can’t believe we’re now halfway through June! As the solstice approaches and summer sinks in, I’m looking forward to slowing down a bit and perhaps even taking some time off (though it’s so hard for my mind to leave the shop even when we travel!).

Because time snuck up on me, we won’t be having a crafting event this month, but we’ll be back to our regular routine in July. Thank you for bearing with me! We still have two amazing book club meetings scheduled for June though—you can learn more about them below.

Thank you all for being here and reading this newsletter, and I hope to see you soon at the shop. Oh! Also, we now have our summer hours: we’re open Tuesday - Friday 10am-6pm, Saturday 10am-5pm, and Sunday 11am-4pm.

One last housekeeping note: we’ll be closed on Sunday, June 21st for Father’s Day. You’ll hear from me next at the end of the month for a roundup of the last days of June and all you can expect in July.

I hope you have a lovely, sunny Sunday!

All best wishes,

Hailey

sign up here

We're so excited to partner with Grow it Green Morristown to offer a new seasonal book club: Seeds & Reads! Seeds & Reads focuses on building community and fostering environmental education through a shared love of books, nature, sustainability, and regenerative agriculture. Each season, we'll read a new book that touches upon one or more of these topics. The book club will meet once a quarter, often near the solstice or the equinox. If you love reading, gardening, farming, or just meeting kind-hearted people within Morris County & beyond, we hope you'll join us. The book club is free and open to all, no purchase necessary—we just ask that you sign up here in advance so we know how many people to expect. Our first book is Good Soil by Jeff Chu, a “profound meditation on nature, heritage, and belonging, from an accomplished journalist who left New York City for life on a working farm.” If you’d like to buy a copy through us, you can do so here. Either way, we’d love for you to join us to discuss this beautiful book.

join us for book club

This month’s much-anticipated book club pick is Land by Maggie O’Farrell. Set in Ireland primarily in the years following the Great Hunger, you can always expect the best from Maggie O’Farrell: beautiful writing, complex, deeply human characters, and gorgeous descriptions of the natural world. We hope you’ll join us to discuss this stunning novel - you can get your ticket here.

1. The Milkwood Permaculture Living Handbook by Kirsten Bradley

The Milkwood Permaculture Living Handbook is your guide to improving your home, health and happiness – and the planet – one simple step at a time.
Packed with practical skills and projects, it’s regenerative living for busy people who want to make a positive impact in a world out of balance. Discover how simple changes to your every day can make a big difference. Maybe it’s decluttering your home, growing sprouts on your windowsill, connecting with your community or taking on a locavore mini-challenge. Maybe it’s going waste-free or falling in love with compost. Inspired by the life-affirming principles of permaculture, all 60 habits will help you reconnect with your ecosystem, save money and celebrate sustainable living. Wherever you start, this book will help you change your lifestyle in small but significant ways – one powerful, practical habit at a time – towards a resilient, abundant life and a hopeful future for all.

2. Compassion in Crisis by Kate Rose Weiner

How do we live in the age of disaster? In this updated and expanded guide to collective crisis preparedness, Kailea and Kate, organizers and coeditors for the book and magazine publisher Loam, share community-shaped strategies on how to practically navigate the challenges posed by overlapping catastrophes—be they environmental, economic, political, or otherwise. Help is here for our bodies, hearts, minds, and shared homes. By amplifying resources for resilience, the authors underscore preparedness as a constant, communal practice. They offer inspiration from frontline organizers who help their communities prepare for emergencies, demonstrate how to envision probable futures after upheaval, and showcase people-powered projects that nurture collective regeneration. With engaging prompts, concise checklists, and heartfelt advice, Compassion in Crisis helps its readers build and sustain the durable mutual aid networks necessary for rapid response in the face of disaster. This is your invitation into the lifelong work of caring for our Earth and one another as we all find our way through the polycrisis.

3. Insect Safari by Margie Patlak

When science writer Margie Patlak was inspirited to take a quick close-up snapshot of a bee in her backyard, it was the start of a years-long obsession with cataloging and understanding the tiny creatures that were all around her. The essays in her book showcase the superpowers, alien anatomies, and striking untold behaviors and thinking abilities of bugs hidden in plain sight in backyards, parks, gardens, and even in the flowerpots that dot city courtyards and balconies. Each essay focuses on a specific bug and explores the big ideas these little bugs raise, such as whether the maternal instinct is truly instinctual, the value of a short life, whether to blend in or alter your environment, and whether you can have altruism without tribal atrocities. But what perhaps makes Insect Safari the most intriguing is its reporting on the plethora of recent scientific findings revealing there’s more to the inner lives and behaviors of insects than people ever thought possible. Who knew wasps use tools and recognize faces, bees play with balls and do math, ants invented farming way before we did, and even fruit flies mull over their mating choices? These findings reinforce the notion that we aren’t the only intelligent beings on Earth and tap into people’s curiosity about the alien life right here on their own planet.

Just in time for the Bookstore Crawl, we set up these new shelving units that divide the kids’ area from the rest of the shop. They made the perfect spot to display these beautiful wooden toys from Tender Leaf. They’re some of my favorite things we’ve added to the shop in the past few months and I’m happy we can highlight them more in the storefront now and I can share them with you in this newsletter!

All of the toys are so beautiful, but I especially love this little smart car set - we’ve never had anything car-related at the shop before, but as EV owners/lovers I was so excited to see these sweet little wooden EVs. The strawberry pot is also too sweet to bear, and don’t even get me started on the Timber Taxi! Stop by the shop to check out the full range of wooden toys we carry, or shop Tender Leaf toys on our website by clicking here.

Last month for book club we read David George Haskell’s How Flowers Made Our World. One of the things that has stayed with me the most since finishing the book is how the beautiful cut flowers on the shelves at grocery stores are almost always flown in from distant countries around the world with little regulation on the pesticides and harmful chemicals used in their growing. While there is still a place for the beauty and ubiquity of these cut flowers, I’m so looking forward to trying to grow more of our own cut flowers at the community garden plot this year. These are some of the books we carry that you can use to plan your own cut flower garden.

1. The Cut Flower Garden by Jo Turner

The Cut Flower Garden is a delightfully illustrated guide to growing your own beautiful flowers all year round. Discover how to grow an assortment of floral beauties from foxgloves and hydrangeas to Japanese windflowers and cosmos—the opportunities and bouquet arrangements are endless! With musings on the meaning of flowers, advice for choosing the right size vase, and tips for making your cut flowers last longer, gorgeous posies are just a season away. A planting chart summarizing the most useful information from the flower profiles is also included, along with guidance on colors and inspiration for arrangements. With an emphasis on seasons rather than months, the book is a beautiful and practical gift for a garden enthusiast, whether they live in the northern or southern hemisphere.

2. A Year of Cut Flowers by Sarah Raven

In Sarah Raven’s A Year of Cut Flowers, you’ll find plenty of inspiration and practical advice such as how to choose high, medium, and low productive cut-and-come-again plants, which plants should form the backbone of any cutting patch or garden, plant rotation, and a year-round plan to achieve efficient cut flower production and ensure highest possible production from minimal space. With this information up your sleeve, you’ll have a house full of flowers and a garden that looks better—always jam-packed with color—because of your harvest.

3. The Beginner’s Cut Flower Garden by Elizabeth Brown

Flowers have the power to heal, connect, and bring joy, often when we need it most. And more importantly, the best flowers are those grown with your own two hands. The Beginner’s Cut Flower Garden is the perfect book for gardeners who are dipping a toe into growing cut flowers for the first time. Gardener and therapeutic horticulturalist Elizabeth Brown offers thoughtful, step-by-step, seasonally inspired narratives, information on the flowers to grow, and more. With the poetry of a classic horticultural guide and the accessibility of a contemporary garden club, Brown brings a collaborative, welcoming spirit to the process of growing flowers: we’re all beginners here.

Happy weekend and welcome back to another newsletter!

Once again (but who’s counting?!) I’m recommitting to sending a newsletter out weekly. There’s always exciting events and new books and gift items I want to tell you about, and I love sharing details about bookselling and life at the shop.

However, something has been happening lately. I was struggling to think of the term for what it is, before realizing that it was happening right at that moment: writer’s block!

I don’t really know how I feel about writer’s block, since in the past I’ve tended to agree with the advice to just keep showing up to write and eventually something will come together. I think if I had the time to show up more now then I could find a way out of it, but because of the high levels of busyness I find myself in at the moment, time and open thinking space are rare.

As Mario, my friends, and my fellow booksellers know, I’ve been focusing lately on building systems that will standardize some of the running of the store and give me more time to spend with my creative pursuits, but these systems take time. One year ago today (how time flies!) we had the ribbon cutting for the shop’s new location, and it has been an amazing year filled with more connections, growth, and serendipity than I could have hoped for. But there was a lot for me to adjust to, and while I think I now have somewhat of a handle on most things (however tentatively), I need to work on bringing all these tangled processes from my mind into actual structures at the shop.

All of this is to say that my brain is stretched a bit thin at the moment, so while I work on rebuilding my stores of creative energies, I humbly ask for your help! Is there anything you’d like me to write about? Particularly lately, in one of the many wonderful serendipities of the shop, I’ve met many lovely newsletter readers visiting the store for the first time. If you’ve never visited the shop, what would you like to know about it? Even if you have visited many times, do you have any questions about our story, or might you have a need for a book recommendation? So much of my motivation lately has been relational, so I’d love to write directly to you, dear readers. If you have any questions about me, the shop, books, nature, or anything in between, just reply to this email and I’ll hopefully get back to you (anonymously, of course!) in a future newsletter.

I so look forward to hearing from you, and I hope you have a wonderful Sunday.

All best wishes,

Hailey

get your ticket here

Just a few spots left! This week we’re returning to a crafting favorite, needle felting—and for the first time in years, we’ll be doing 3-dimensional needle felting! When I saw these sweet bees, I knew it was the perfect project for this time of year when bees are the most active. Learn how to needle felt and make at least one of these delightful bees with us, and bring home the knowledge to finish up your other bee or complete other needle felting projects. Get your ticket now if you know you’d like to join us—we’ll have a lovely evening sipping tea, chatting, and crafting!

get your ticket here

This month we’re reading How Flowers Made Our World: The Story of Nature’s Revolutionaries by David George Haskell. As the world blooms around us, it’s the perfect time to grow (pun intended) a deeper appreciation of the flowers we see each day when we step outside. He writes, “Without flowers, human beings would not exist. We are a floral species. Flowers catalyzed our evolution, and we now depend on them for food and a healthy planet. When we perfume ourselves, give a loved one a bouquet, or use blooms in gardens and religious ceremonies, we honor the special bond between people and flowers. The study of flowers also shaped modern science and horticulture in ways both marvelous and, sometimes, unjust. Looking to the future, flowers offer us lessons on resilience and creativity in the face of rapid environmental change. We need floral creativity, beauty, and joy more than ever.” How Flowers Made Our World combines lyrical writing and the latest in scientific research to explore some of the most consequential life forms ever to have evolved, showing how our planet came to be and how it thrives today.

learn more

We’re very excited to be participating in the second annual New Jersey Bookstore Crawl! Even though we had only been open at our new location for about a month, we had such a wonderful time participating in the crawl last year. This year we have even more exciting things on offer! We’ll go over our plans for the weekend soon, but for now, you can start planning your route on the map if you’d like to try to visit several shops that weekend.

sign up here

Mark your calendar for the next event in our ongoing speaker series with the Madison Environmental Commission! This time we’ll be discussing forests, using the brilliant work of Suzanne Simard, author of Finding the Mother Tree and When the Forest Breathes, as a starting point. Simard is famous for the groundbreaking research that proved what indigenous people have always known: trees communicate with each other through underground fungal networks. If we listen to the Mother Trees, we have the potential to regenerate our forests, harvest without clearcutting, and halt the wildfires that are consuming natural areas. The event will start off with an intro to Simard’s books and move from the Pacific Northwest to Morris County. Kirsten Wallenstein, an MEC member and a stewardship leader for Madison’s forests, will talk about bringing resilience back to our natural spaces by managing deer, controlling invasive plants and planting for biodiversity. Then Susan Landau, Xerces Ambassador and guardian of Foote’s Pond Wood in Morristown, will teach you how to plant a pocket forest in your yard. It’s less work than a meadow—and supercharged with ecological benefits. Trees, like being part of a community, as opposed to being isolated with islands of mulch. The event is free and open to all—we just ask that you sign up here in advance. We hope to see you there!

sign up here

We're so excited to partner with Grow it Green Morristown to offer a new seasonal book club: Seeds & Reads! Seeds & Reads focuses on building community and fostering environmental education through a shared love of books, nature, sustainability, and regenerative agriculture. Each season, we'll read a new book that touches upon one or more of these topics. The book club will meet once a quarter, often near the solstice or the equinox. If you love reading, gardening, farming, or just meeting kind-hearted people within Morris County & beyond, we hope you'll join us. The book club is free and open to all, no purchase necessary—we just ask that you sign up here in advance so we know how many people to expect. Our first book is Good Soil by Jeff Chu, a “profound meditation on nature, heritage, and belonging, from an accomplished journalist who left New York City for life on a working farm.” If you’d like to buy a copy through us, you can do so here. Either way, we’d love for you to join us to discuss this beautiful book.

1. Climate Wayfinding by Katharine K. Wilkinson

Through transformational programs and books, including the national bestseller All We Can Save, Wilkinson has inspired hundreds of thousands of climate journeys. In Climate Wayfinding, she shares a proven process for looking inward with care, outward with curiosity, and forward with courage. Ultimately, readers chart a course toward playing their unique part in our collective healing. With her singular blend of warmth and rigor, Wilkinson lights the way through stirring personal essays, interwoven with the wisdom of other climate leaders and the beauty of poetry, art, and song. A book to sit with and savor, Climate Wayfinding also invites engagement with journaling prompts, practical exercises, and guides for conversation. Whether steeped in climate or newly curious, readers will discover something grounding and generative in these pages.

2. Foraging for Healing Herbs by Adele Nozedar

Steeped in magic and folklore, this book by bestselling author Adele Nozedar encourages us to slow down, notice the seasons and spot the herbs, trees and flowers all around us. Healers in the early medieval period drew upon the bounty of the earth to create the Nine Plants Spell – a collection of plants used for medicine, food and magic. Now, wherever we live, we too can create our own charms and rituals with healing herbs. This charming book is the perfect way to unearth the little-known herbal treasures hiding in plain sight all around us – and to discover just how much they can give us.

3. Convergence: Poetry on Environmental Impacts of War

Convergence: Poetry on Environmental Impacts of War offers a groundbreaking and vital perspective on war’s destruction of the natural world-the creatures, plants, soil, water, and atmosphere of Earth. In poems and contextual comments, 61 contemporary poets focus on military damages to the ecosystems on six continents and the moon. Framed by a cogent introduction and a pair of forewords, one on the poetry and the other on global consequences, the poems are accompanied by a tally of ecological costs and a set of thought-provoking discussion and writing prompts for teens and adults. This compelling anthology alerts readers to environmental degradation of our planet while affirming nature’s resilience and regeneration. The anthology covers almost two millennia, beginning with the Marcomannic Wars (167-180 CE) and ending with the 21st-century wars in Ukraine and Gaza. The conflicts and concomitant environmental damage addressed by the poems are international in scope. Convergence includes ninety poems, each paired with an Author’s Note, by U.S. and international poets, including John Balaban, Gillian Clarke, Camille T. Dungy, Ferida Durakovic, W.D. Ehrhart, William Heyen, Cynthia Hogue, Denise Low, Craig Santos Perez, Vivian Faith Prescott, Eric Paul Shaffer, Jillian Sullivan, Brian Turner, Pamela Uschuk, and Mai Der Vang.

One of the new things we’re carrying at the shop are these beautiful seed packs from Hudson Valley Seed Co! I’ve wanted to add some seeds to the inventory for a while now, and Hudson Valley’s beautiful artist-designed seed packs are a perfect place to start. We currently have collections of seed packs for Cut Flower Gardens, Pollinator Gardens, and Vegetable Gardens, plus we have a box of Northeast Native Meadow Mix. These packs make beautiful gifts for the avid gardener and truly each seed pack is a little work of art.

With the next few days looking so bright and sunny, it’s the perfect time to get outside if you live in the area, particularly if you like hot weather! These are a few of my favorite books to inspire outdoor adventures here in NJ.

1. Birds of New Jersey Field Guide by Stan Tekiela

Make bird-watching in New Jersey even more enjoyable. With Stan Tekiela’s famous bird guide, field identification is simple and informative. There’s no need to look through dozens of photos of birds that don’t live in your area. This handy book features 132 species of New Jersey birds organized by color for ease of use. Full-page photographs present the species as you’ll see them in nature, and a “compare” feature helps you to decide between look-alikes. This second edition includes 10 new species, updated photographs and range maps, expanded information, and even more of Stan’s expert insights.

2. 50 Hikes in New Jersey

Known more for its urban areas than its green spaces, the Garden State is actually a crossroads for major interstate trails including the Maine-to-Georgia Appalachian Trail, the 150-mile Highlands Trail, and the 60-mile Delaware and Raritan Canal State Park Trail. Hike along the Appalachian ridge or over the ragged Wyanokies, pass into pine barrens or through marshes and dunes on the coast, and you’ll see that New Jersey has so much more to offer than just cities. These 50 routes cover walks, hikes, and backpacking trips from the Kittatinnies to Cape May. With excursions from 1.5 to 28 miles in length, accompanied by driving directions, trailhead information, difficulty ratings, and detailed maps, this roster of hikes will suit everyone from families out for a nature walk to adventurous backpackers up for challenge.

3. Wildlife Out Your Window: Fascinating Facts about 100 Animals Commonly Seen in the mid-Atlantic U.S. States by Brad Timm

Did you know that: Blue Jay feathers are not blue...they are actually brown (they look blue due to an optical illusion)! Some frogs survive freezing by creating their own anti-freeze! Some foxes live up in trees! These are just a few of the hundreds of interesting facts you’ll learn about wildlife of the mid-Atlantic U.S. states in this book. This guidebook contains a page each of interesting facts for 100 of your favorite animals of the mid-Atlantic U.S. and surrounding regions...Robins, Chipmunks, Black Bears, Bullfrogs, and so many more. You’ll look at the wildlife all around you in a totally new light with this handy guide. In addition, you can keep track of your wildlife sightings with monthly checklists at the back of this book, and you’ll learn simple things you can do to help wildlife.

Happy Mother’s Day everyone! We’re closed at the shop today, but I wanted to send out a little newsletter to highlight some great books and a few exciting announcements.

Between the upcoming NJ Bookstore Crawl, our next event with the Madison Environmental Commission, and our new seasonal book club with Grow it Green, there’s much to look forward to as we get closer to the summer solstice.

It’s been a wonderfully busy week at the shop: with Mother’s Day and Teacher Appreciation Week to shop for, I got to help so many people find the perfect books and gifts, one of my favorite things to do. In case you didn’t know, we also offer free gift wrapping (another one of my favorite things is wrapping gifts!).

After a particularly busy Saturday, it’s nice to take today to rest and spend time with my mom and grandmother. Thank you to all the mother figures in my life: Mom, Tere, Nanny, & Grandma—I truly would never have been able to grow this shop and community into what it is today without your love and support.

I hope you all have a wonderful day with your families, and I hope to see you at the shop when we open once again on Tuesday.

All best wishes,

Hailey

get your ticket here

This month we’re returning to a crafting favorite, needle felting—and for the first time in years, we’ll be doing 3-dimensional needle felting! When I saw these sweet bees, I knew it was the perfect project for this time of year when bees are the most active. Learn how to needle felt and make at least one of these delightful bees with us, and bring home the knowledge to finish up your other bee or complete other needle felting projects. Get your ticket now if you know you’d like to join us—we’ll have a lovely evening sipping tea, chatting, and crafting!

get your ticket here

This month we’re reading How Flowers Made Our World: The Story of Nature’s Revolutionaries by David George Haskell. As the world blooms around us, it’s the perfect time to grow (pun intended) a deeper appreciation of the flowers we see each day when we step outside. He writes, “Without flowers, human beings would not exist. We are a floral species. Flowers catalyzed our evolution, and we now depend on them for food and a healthy planet. When we perfume ourselves, give a loved one a bouquet, or use blooms in gardens and religious ceremonies, we honor the special bond between people and flowers. The study of flowers also shaped modern science and horticulture in ways both marvelous and, sometimes, unjust. Looking to the future, flowers offer us lessons on resilience and creativity in the face of rapid environmental change. We need floral creativity, beauty, and joy more than ever.” How Flowers Made Our World combines lyrical writing and the latest in scientific research to explore some of the most consequential life forms ever to have evolved, showing how our planet came to be and how it thrives today.

learn more

We’re very excited to be participating in the second annual New Jersey Bookstore Crawl! Even though we had only been open at our new location for about a month, we had such a wonderful time participating in the crawl last year. This year we have even more exciting things on offer! We’ll go over our plans for the weekend soon, but for now, you can start planning your route on the map if you’d like to try to visit several shops that weekend.

sign up here

Mark your calendar for the next event in our ongoing speaker series with the Madison Environmental Commission! This time we’ll be discussing forests, using the brilliant work of Suzanne Simard, author of Finding the Mother Tree and When the Forest Breathes, as a starting point. Simard is famous for the groundbreaking research that proved what indigenous people have always known: trees communicate with each other through underground fungal networks. If we listen to the Mother Trees, we have the potential to regenerate our forests, harvest without clearcutting, and halt the wildfires that are consuming natural areas. The event will start off with an intro to Simard’s books and move from the Pacific Northwest to Morris County. Kirsten Wallenstein, an MEC member and a stewardship leader for Madison’s forests, will talk about bringing resilience back to our natural spaces by managing deer, controlling invasive plants and planting for biodiversity. Then Susan Landau, Xerces Ambassador and guardian of Foote’s Pond Wood in Morristown, will teach you how to plant a pocket forest in your yard. It’s less work than a meadow—and supercharged with ecological benefits. Trees, like being part of a community, as opposed to being isolated with islands of mulch. The event is free and open to all—we just ask that you sign up here in advance. We hope to see you there!

sign up here

We're so excited to partner with Grow it Green Morristown to offer a new seasonal book club: Seeds & Reads! Seeds & Reads focuses on building community and fostering environmental education through a shared love of books, nature, sustainability, and regenerative agriculture. Each season, we'll read a new book that touches upon one or more of these topics. The book club will meet once a quarter, often near the solstice or the equinox. If you love reading, gardening, farming, or just meeting kind-hearted people within Morris County & beyond, we hope you'll join us. The book club is free and open to all, no purchase necessary—we just ask that you sign up here in advance so we know how many people to expect. Our first book is Good Soil by Jeff Chu, a “profound meditation on nature, heritage, and belonging, from an accomplished journalist who left New York City for life on a working farm.” If you’d like to buy a copy through us, you can do so here. Either way, we’d love for you to join us to discuss this beautiful book.

1. Dead Bees Still Sting: Tales of Life at the Edge of Nature by Susan Cormier

Beekeeper-poet Susan Cormier’s acreage is filled with an ever-changing cast of animals, from the hand-raised quail Birb, who likes to play peekaboo, to companionable cats and dogs, Frodo the rescued rabbit, deer, elusive mink, and owls. Over five seasons Cormier takes readers through the rhythms of semi-agricultural life, reflecting on the dichotomy between beauty and grief, loss and renewal, and humor and the often heart-wrenching realities of animal existence in an agrarian landscape. Lyrical and poignant, Dead Bees Still Sting is a moving meditation on the cycles of nature, vulnerability, persistence, and survival. Above all, it is a celebration of what it means to belong to a place, to witness its changes, and to find beauty and meaning in the ongoing conversation between humans and nature.

2. A Forest Begins Anew by Louise M. Aamodt

Set against the backdrop of a devastating forest fire, A Forest Begins Anew unfolds the life cycle of a particularly resilient ecosystem. As smoke jumpers leap from planes and pinecones eventually unseal from the heat of the fire, the story poetically weaves the effects of a forest fire into a vibrant tapestry that reveals a delicate balance between destruction and renewal. Back matter containing fascinating facts and further reading portrays forest fires not just as destructive forces but as catalysts for growth and rebirth. With its lyrical rhyming text and breathtaking illustrations, A Forest Begins Anew honors nature’s ability to survive against the odds.

3. The Evolution of Fire: Essays on Crisis by Angela Pelster

Crisis is an agent of evolution, and Angela Pelster knows what it means to evolve. As a child, she burned grass to keep weeds at bay and watched tadpoles transform. She basked in the warmth of her father’s love but was burned by his rage, and she witnessed a sudden, unnamable change occur in her older sister after an encounter with a stranger in a white van. In adulthood, she survived the explosion of her marriage, the destruction of her burning home, and a year spent as the single mother of a toddler without a home of their own. And like us all, she has weathered the upheaval of our current atmosphere—political instability, climate change, mass extinction. But in spite of the world’s violence, Pelster manages to remain open to its beauty, deciding not to resist change, but to give herself over to it and let evolution make her into a new animal. She plumbs the depths of ancestral knowledge to uncover the scale of our ancient capacity for adaptation, from humankind’s early harnessing of fire to the grandmothers responsible for our continued existence. Meditative and curious, pulsing with fascination, fear, and the untamable human spirit, The Evolution of Fire contemplates who we are now and what we still might become.

Some of our favorite non-book items at the shop are these beautiful garden signs. Designed by Joe Wirtheim of Victory Garden of Tomorrow, these signs are made in Oregon with high-quality, weather resistant materials that mean your sign will last outside in your garden for years. As Douglas Tallamy writes in Nature’s Best Hope, one of the hardest things in transitioning your yard from ornamental plants to natives is suburbia’s perception of curb appeal and the aesthetic differences that native plants sometimes bring. These signs are a lovely, unassuming way to let others know about what you’re up to in your own garden and perhaps even plant the seeds in their mind to consider pollinators and other wildlife when they plan their own yards.

Joe has written of his inspiration for the signs: “I wanted to contribute to our neighborhoods’ sense of friendliness that we want to cultivate, and most of all, to declare what we feel is important. When I see a sign reading this is a "Pollinator Friendly Garden," then that space is activated in my mind. It has purpose and intention now. The sign gives the yard a voice, one that speaks a language in keeping with the architectural languages of the home so that they live well together. A type, color and shape that compliments both the yard and the home, imbuing both with a sense of delight in what is truly important.”

You can browse our selection of these wonderful garden signs online here and reserve yours for pickup at the shop.

While Mary Oliver pairs well with any season, her work is particularly magical in the spring. As nature unfolds into full bloom, Mary Oliver’s dedication to paying close attention to the natural world around us helps us better appreciate small wonders we might otherwise overlook. Whether you prefer poetry, prose, or a mix of both, you can’t go wrong with any of these three collections, whether you’re a long-time Mary Oliver fan or just starting out with her work.

1. Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver presents a personal selection of her best work in this definitive collection spanning more than five decades of her esteemed literary career. Throughout her celebrated career, Mary Oliver has touched countless readers with her brilliantly crafted verse, expounding on her love for the physical world and the powerful bonds between all living things. Identified as “far and away, this country’s best selling poet” by Dwight Garner, she now returns with a stunning and definitive collection of her writing from the last fifty years. Carefully curated, these 200 plus poems feature Oliver’s work from her very first book of poetry, No Voyage and Other Poems, published in 1963 at the age of 28, through her most recent collection, Felicity, published in 2015. This timeless volume, arranged by Oliver herself, showcases the beloved poet at her edifying best. Within these pages, she provides us with an extraordinary and invaluable collection of her passionate, perceptive, and much-treasured observations of the natural world.

2. Upstream: Selected Essays

“In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.” So begins Upstream, a collection of essays in which revered poet Mary Oliver reflects on her willingness, as a young child and as an adult, to lose herself within the beauty and mysteries of both the natural world and the world of literature. Emphasizing the significance of her childhood “friend” Walt Whitman, through whose work she first understood that a poem is a temple, “a place to enter, and in which to feel,” and who encouraged her to vanish into the world of her writing, Oliver meditates on the forces that allowed her to create a life for herself out of work and love. Upstream follows Oliver as she contemplates the pleasure of artistic labor, her boundless curiosity for the flora and fauna that surround her, and the responsibility she has inherited from Shelley, Wordsworth, Emerson, Poe, and Frost, the great thinkers and writers of the past, to live thoughtfully, intelligently, and to observe with passion. Throughout this collection, Oliver positions not just herself upstream but us as well as she encourages us all to keep moving, to lose ourselves in the awe of the unknown, and to give power and time to the creative and whimsical urges that live within us.

3. Little Alleluias: Collected Poetry and Prose

An archival compendium of three complete works by Mary Oliver: the book-length poem The Leaf and the Cloud, the collection What Do We Know, and essays from Long Life—with a foreword by fellow Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Postcolonial Love Poem Natalie Diaz. For the many admirers of Mary Oliver’s breathtaking poetry of touch and transcendence, as well as for those coming to her words for the first time, Little Alleluias is a revelation. Page by page, she invites us to walk through her minutes, her moments, and revere the light and dark and rainbowed clothes of world alongside her. With three distinct books collected in one volume for the first time, Little Alleluias asks what passes and what persists, and offers readers the peace that every mind deserves.

Happy May!

Thanks so much to everyone who came out last weekend for Indie Bookstore Day – it was amazing to see so many of you despite the rainy weather! Alison, Mario, and I coordinated to match for the celebration which was extra fun.

The response to our new tote bags was also delightful! I wrote a little post on Instagram about it, but it took me over 2 years to release a new tote bag design because of my indecision when it comes to my own illustrations and designs. But thankfully I was struck by inspiration one day and adapted my previous Plant Native Plant design to come up with this double-sided, 100% organic cotton tote which is truly massive, enabling you to carry around as many books and crafts around as humanly possible!

After a busy first four months of the year, May is unusually quiet events-wise. Still, you’ll see below our monthly crafting event and monthly book club at the shop. I’m hoping the extra time allows me to focus on some longer term projects, including getting ready for several big events next month, like the NJ Bookstore Crawl happening the first weekend of June.

With that, I’m off to our community garden plot to do gardening – what a delightful time of year it is! I hope you too are enjoying some gardening this month. I’ll see you back here next week with our usual book recommendations and other newsletter updates.

Oh, and if you’d like to custom order anything in for Mother’s Day next weekend, just reply to this email! You can also stop by the shop to browse our curated selection of books, stationery, and gifts. We hope to see you soon!

All best wishes,

Hailey

get your ticket here

This month we’re returning to a crafting favorite, needle felting—and for the first time in years, we’ll be doing 3-dimensional needle felting! When I saw these sweet bees, I knew it was the perfect project for this time of year when bees are the most active. Learn how to needle felt and make at least one of these delightful bees with us, and bring home the knowledge to finish up your other bee or complete other needle felting projects. Get your ticket now if you know you’d like to join us—we’ll have a lovely evening sipping tea, chatting, and crafting!

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We’re very excited for this month’s book club pick: How Flowers Made Our World: The Story of Nature’s Revolutionaries by David George Haskell. As the world blooms around us, it’s the perfect time to grow (pun intended) a deeper appreciation of the flowers we see each day when we step outside. He writes, “Without flowers, human beings would not exist. We are a floral species. Flowers catalyzed our evolution, and we now depend on them for food and a healthy planet. When we perfume ourselves, give a loved one a bouquet, or use blooms in gardens and religious ceremonies, we honor the special bond between people and flowers. The study of flowers also shaped modern science and horticulture in ways both marvelous and, sometimes, unjust. Looking to the future, flowers offer us lessons on resilience and creativity in the face of rapid environmental change. We need floral creativity, beauty, and joy more than ever.” How Flowers Made Our World combines lyrical writing and the latest in scientific research to explore some of the most consequential life forms ever to have evolved, showing how our planet came to be and how it thrives today.

Good morning and happy Sunday!

It may be gray and rainy here today, but it’s also the start of Earth Week, which brings Earth Day on April 22nd. Earth Day also happens to be The Nature of Reading’s birthday - exactly 4 years since we started as an online store in 2022 and exactly 3 years since we opened our first storefront on Main Street. And now we’re also celebrating our first full year in our new space on Green Village Road!

As we mentioned in our last newsletter, we’ll be holding our big celebration on Saturday, April 25th which also happens to be Independent Bookstore Day. We truly hope you can join us to celebrate—we never would have gotten this far without you. Here’s what you can look forward to on Saturday:

• a variety of complimentary nature-themed desserts and snacks

• a giveaway of a gift basket filled with over $150 of books and gifts from the shop - every purchase you make on Saturday is an entry in the giveaway!

• a fairy scavenger hunt around the shop for kids - each child who completes a scavenger hunt receives a delightful Earth crayon and an entry in a giveaway for a $50 gift card

• delightful Loré Pemberton coloring pages set up for kids and adults to enjoy relaxing coloring sessions

• new shop merch - t-shirts and (potentially, if they arrive on time) new tote bags for the first time in years!

• free handmade Earth Day felted bookmark with every purchase over $50

• 1 Libro.fm Golden Ticket hidden at the shop - find it and you win a year’s supply of free audiobooks! (1 credit per month - we love Libro.fm so much, they’re a wonderful alternative to Amazon-owned Audible and they’ve been so incredibly supportive of indie bookstores ever since they were founded)

• wholesome community time with fellow book and nature lovers!

We’ve started at Saturday, but leading up to the end of the week we also have several other events to celebrate Earth Week. You can read more about our programming in the events section below, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t plug our free speaker event with the Madison Environmental Commission that we have scheduled for tomorrow night, 7pm at the Madison Community Arts Center: Plant This, Not That: an interview and Q&A with author Elise Howard, who will be sharing all the insight gained from her amazing book, Plant This Not That: Over 200 Native Plant Swaps for a More Sustainable, Pollinator-Friendly Garden. The event is free and open to all—just please sign up here in advance so we know how many people to expect.

Stepping back from the delights of this upcoming week for a moment, I must admit that 2026 has been an incredibly challenging year. Between the horrors of national and international politics, the ongoing climate crisis, and the sudden widespread use of AI, it’s taken every bit of strength to make it past the everlasting winter to the lengthening days of spring. These things weigh on me, as a small business owner and as a human, but I’ll always be grateful to have a physical space to talk to other people about these issues, to share concerns and comforts.

Though the year has been challenging, it’s also been so rewarding: March was our second-best month yet for sales, and we’ve had the immense privilege of reaching wider and wider audiences with our books. With the way the world is going, more and more people are seeing how important it is to connect with one another, to engage in their local communities with the people that will be there for them when the next tough time hits, to support each other when the outside world seems more turbulent than ever.

Hope, as always, is an active practice, and it’s one I continue to strive for even when the siren call of despair grows ever louder. There is always reason to have hope, and what better time is there for Earthlings to embrace hope than Earth Week.

With that, I’m sure you’ll hear some more mushy reflections from me later this week, but I hope you’ll stop by the shop soon for one of our events or just to browse, and we can practice hope together.

All best wishes,

Hailey

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It’s already time for the next event in our Nature Lovers Speaker Series with the Madison Environmental Commission, and you won’t want to miss this one! Join us at 7pm on April 20th at the Madison Community Arts Center for a discussion with Elise Howard, author of Plant This, Not That. Elise’s book highlights over 200 native plant swaps that you can make in your own garden to better support pollinators, local wildlife, and our planet. Elise will be interviewed by garden designer Sarah Hunt of Sarah Digs Plants. If you’re interested in learning about how to incorporate more native plants into your own yard, this event is a perfect place to start and we truly hope you can join us. The event is free and open to all, we just ask that you register in advance here.

sign up here

Update: Mamas Who Walk is currently monitoring the weather for Wednesday, and if it’s raining the story time will be rescheduled-if you’ve signed up you’ll receive notice if it’s moved. We’re very happy to be participating in an Earth Day story time this year with Mamas Who Walk! On April 22nd, join Stephanie Addyson’s wonderful group of moms who meet to go for a walk and get coffee—two of the best activities! After the walk there will be a story time at James Park with eco-focused books from The Nature of Reading, plus a discount at the shop that day for all moms and families who participate.

get your ticket here

Update: we have just three spots left! All the fox kits are sold out, but we have one owl left and two bears. This month we’ll be crafting these sweet mini embroidery hoops! With blocks of color already printed on the fabric and only a 4-inch hoop, these whimsical folk animals make great projects for beginners. We’ll learn all the necessary embroidery stitches at the event and get started with the project, then you’ll bring it home to finish up in your own time, ideally with a cup of tea and a vase of flowers nearby. It’s spring crafting time, hooray! Get your ticket now if you know you’d like to join us—you can choose from any of the three animal designs but there are limited numbers of each.

It’s our birthday this week! We can’t believe our 4th year Earth Day anniversary is already here. As always, we’re doing a big combo celebration on Indie Bookstore Day, which falls on Saturday, April 25th this year. Join us all day at the shop for Earth month treats, a special raffle, new merch, and so much more (see above in the intro). We truly hope to see you there—none of this would have been possible without you.

1. Wild Folk by Jackie Morris & Tamsin Abbott

These tales from the stones are neither new nor old. They are full of ‘wild folk’, shape-shifting spirits that carry the energy that connects all things. You will meet selkies and silver trout and the black fox, as big as a wolf and so fast and cunning she drives the lord of the manor to madness and oblivion; the woman of flowers who is happier living as an owl; the boy who learns to feel the songs and stories of trees through his skin; Wayland, the smith who can hammer metal to such airy thinness he makes his own wings; and the great white raven, a bird so rare it awakens the king who sleeps beneath the stones of the wild west cliffs of Wales. From a unique collaboration between the co-author of The Lost Words and The Lost Spells and an acclaimed visual artist comes seven richly illustrated fables of transformation and power, summoned from the ancient stones beneath our feet and transformed by word and image into portals between past and future.

2. Leave the Trees, Please by Benjamin Zephaniah

A gorgeously illustrated picture book that celebrates our connections to nature and to each other while empowering young readers to help protect the earth, from a beloved British poet, musician, actor, and activist. In this powerful love letter to nature, a child who befriends a tree grows up and fights to protect it. With its spare, lyrical text; sumptuous illustrations; and back matter about trees, oxygen, and the carbon cycle, this inviting, inspiring call to save our planet is perfect for Earth Day, and every day.

3. How to Be Hopeful by elin kelsey

“Are you hopeful?” That is the question elin kelsey is most often asked when she speaks to young people about the emotions and anxiety wrought by the climate crisis. How to Be Hopeful is kelsey’s answer, an inspiring exploration of hope as an active, evidence-based response to climate change and environmental degradation. Hope is not merely a passive feeling but an active choice, a stance that must be nurtured despite the ever-present sense of despair and hopelessness that often accompanies the state of the world. Through personal reflections, scientific insights, and practical exercises, How to Be Hopeful emphasizes emotional awareness, community collaboration, and the agency of both humans and non-human species. A seminal contribution to the field of environmental justice,How to Be Hopefulempowers readers to confront their own emotional landscapes, engage in collective action, envision a sustainable future, and ultimately, cultivate a hopeful and resilient response to the pressing issues of our time.

4. The Common Uncommon by Bernd Heinrich

For forty years, Bernd Heinrich has been ensconced in the woods of the northern, or boreal, forest, living in his log cabin amidst a vast sea of spruce, fir, and larch in the mountains of western Maine. The Common Uncommon captures the rhythms of Heinrich’s seasonal life. From the forest he first encountered as a child of German refugees, Heinrich combines his powers of observation with professional expertise, as he notes the beautiful, but not entirely idiosyncratic characteristics—the “common uncommon”—of spiders, ants, chestnut trees, porcupines, owls, and mice. From the elusive single-cell organism called a euglena, which swims in fresh water and is part animal, part plant, to the resourceful wood frog, which nearly freezes into ice each winter while protecting its cells with glucose, Heinrich’s musings on life in the forest stunningly capture the five states of Being, Becoming, Interbeing, Remembering, and Returning. With sharp, evocative prose, The Common Uncommon is a narrative of small surprises in nature, some delightful and some—brought on by climate change—devastating, all seen through the hawk eyes of a world-renowned naturalist.

5. Forty Ways to Know a Tree by Joan Maloof

There are an estimated three trillion trees in the world, half as many as there once were. To honor and protect these vital organisms, a shift in perspective can help expand our understanding beyond simply appreciating trees’ remarkable beauty to discovering the ways they are inextricably connected to our planet, our fellow species, and our spirits. Within these pages, biologist Joan Maloof offers forty distinct ways of encountering, exploring, and learning about a tree. Through engaging, impassioned essays, paired with beautiful watercolor illustrations, she invites us to get to know a tree in so many different ways. Each profile is illustrated with a particular species, representing dozens from all around the world, which combine to create a broader canvas of tree knowledge. This book celebrates the tree itself, with its many roles and parts, as well as its invaluable services to humans and wildlife—providing food, shelter, clean air, water, and, to many, simple joy.

6. In Trees by Robert Moor

One day, on a whim, Robert Moor set out to climb a tree near his home—unwittingly embarking on what would become a decade-long, globe-spanning adventure of intellectual and spiritual transformation. Pursuing the hidden wisdom of trees, he scales to the very top of a giant sequoia while filming a nature documentary with David Attenborough; he treks through swamps in Papua to reach a treehouse-dwelling tribe of hunter-gatherers; and he journeys to a remote research camp in Tanzania, where he spends a memorable night sleeping in a chimpanzee nest, seeking to understand our deep evolutionary history. Eventually, having gained a radical new outlook on both our gnarled past and our ever-branching future, he joins an intrepid clan of climate activists risking everything to halt construction of a new oil pipeline and save an ancient forest. A witty and relentlessly curious excursion through philosophy, history, and science, what begins as an ode to the miracle of trees blossoms into a joyous, daring, fiercely hopeful endeavor to arborize humanity.

7. Myths, Legends, and Tales for a Greener World by Rosalind Kervin

Inspired by traditional myths and folklore from across the world and retold with integrity and respect, the stories in this collection offer a hopeful perspective on how we can better appreciate the natural environment and the species that share our planet. The book is split into five chapters: In the Beginning, The World in Trouble, Respect the Earth, Our Animal Relations, and World Without End. Among these fascinating tales are a retelling of a Chinese story of dragons that help to control the climate, a spiritual tale about a desert stream from Tunisia, a Canadian First Nations story about the coexistence between humans and bears, and a Norse legend about rebirth in springtime. Each story is accompanied with carefully researched notes, detailing the cultural and historical background and other related tales. This book harnesses time-honored wisdom to help imagine how we can transcend environmental degradation and species loss to offer a more harmonious vision of life on Earth.

8. Gardens That Can Save the World by Lottie Delamain

Gardens are the vanguard of positive change, modern-day crucibles for ideas and innovation that provide solutions to some of our most persistent problems, from loneliness and illness, to flooding and drought. Celebrating both the garden and gardener as integral players in a healthier future, Gardens Can Save the World presents a series of strategies that will help the reader imagine the potential that lies in the garden through 65 projects that showcase how gardens are working to repair, heal, empower, nourish, and reimagine. Including both popular and lesser-known gardens at a variety of scales, the book also includes profiles of ten leading garden changemakers from around the world. Plus, there’s tools to take action—with a glossary of plants, materials, and techniques, gardeners can start right away applying these lessons in their own gardens.

9. Outsider Animals by Marlene Zuk

When we think of animals that provide the greatest insights into animal cognition and behavior, primates and honeybees come to mind, or perhaps whales or octopus. What about the raccoons that plunder our rubbish at night, or the coyotes that threaten pets and livestock, or the gulls that divebomb for snacks at the beach? Outsider Animals challenges everything you thought you knew about the overlooked animals that live in proximity to humans, sharing the stories that each has to tell about adaptation and cohabitation on our increasingly crowded planet. Writing with an infectious blend of humor and curiosity, Zuk invites us to reflect on our relationships with these close-to-home creatures and the ways our lives encroach on theirs, and to draw lessons from their behavior in all its fascinating complexity.

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This month we’re reading When the Forest Breathes: Renewal and Resilience in the Natural World by Suzanne Simard. The author of Finding the Mother Tree is back with another stunning book that dives into her critical research into the interconnectedness of forests and their cycles of regeneration, moving between details of her own life growing up in a family of loggers to the time she has spent with local Indigenous communities learning how to best steward a forest. With her evocative yet approachable writing style and concise distillation of her scientific research, this powerful book is one you won’t want to miss. You can get your ticket for book club now at this link.

With the last frost date for Zone 7A rapidly approaching, gardening season is nearly in full swing! If you’re a longtime newsletter reader, you’ll know that Mario and I and some friends had a community garden plot for the first time last year. Having only ever lived in apartments where there was no outdoor space or gardening was not permitted, a lot of learning happened over the summer!

Now that we’ve been through one growing season and have had some winter months to prepare for 2026, we’re more excited than ever to get planting our favorite vegetables and a number of native flowers to support the garden’s pollinators. Whether you’re growing vegetables, flowers, or planning the garden around your home, any of these three books we recently added to our collections will provide much colorful inspiration for you to grow your best garden yet.

1. The Productive Garden by Stephanie Hafferty

Self-sufficiency doesn’t need to remain a dream. With over 30 years of experience, Stephanie Hafferty shows how easy it can be to grow your own, save money, reduce your consumption, increase resilience, and care for the planet – all from your own back yard. Stephanie does it every day, growing food to nourish herself and her family, and cultivating plants to create everyday household essentials. She also knows how to make a harvest last longer, and how to feed the soil so that it gives back generously, year after year. As a leading no-dig and permaculture expert, Stephanie will show you sustainable methods of cultivating a generous and abundant garden, bringing together affordable homesteading with the reality of modern life. Her guidance is brought to life by Jason Ingram’s beautiful photography. Whether you want to start small, have already embarked on a journey to self-sufficiency, or are looking for a complete lifestyle change, this will become your go-to book and essential guide. 

2. The Beginner’s Cut Flower Garden by Elizabeth Brown

Flowers have the power to heal, connect, and bring joy, often when we need it most. And more importantly, the best flowers are those grown with your own two hands. The Beginner’s Cut Flower Garden is the perfect book for gardeners who are dipping a toe into growing cut flowers for the first time. Gardener and therapeutic horticulturalist Elizabeth Brown offers thoughtful, step-by-step, seasonally inspired narratives, information on the flowers to grow, and more. With the poetry of a classic horticultural guide and the accessibility of a contemporary garden club, Brown brings a collaborative, welcoming spirit to the process of growing flowers: we’re all beginners here.

3. The Contemporary Cottage Garden by Pamela Hubbard

In The Contemporary Cottage Garden, longtime gardener Pamela Hubbard expertly walks the gardener through what it takes to grow in the cottage garden style—where flowers and vegetables are intermingled in a casual display of colorful brilliance—while also meeting the needs of the modern world in an era of increased weather extremes. An abundance of beautiful photos by Rob Cardillo highlights Hubbard’s cottage garden in Pennsylvania, where she has integrated invaluable techniques for cottage gardening in a contemporary way. Gardeners at any stage of their gardening journey will find invaluable insight on gardening for increased biodiversity and pollinators, creating a cottage meadow garden, designing a gravel garden for drought-prone areas, and more. The cottage garden style has been practiced across time, and Hubbard extends its bountiful possibilities through a modern, ecological lens.

Happy Spring/Easter/Passover/Ostara to all who celebrate!

We’re closed at the shop today, but we simply had to let you know about our April events! It’s a busy time for us with Earth Day, Independent Bookstore Day, and our shop birthday (we’re turning 4!) all falling at the end of the month. Without further ado, check out our events below, and we’ll be back soon with Earth month book recommendations, jumbled ramblings, and so much more.

All best wishes,

Hailey

get your ticket here

We’re so excited to be returning to Reeves-Reed Arboretum’s Daffodil Day Festival again this year! If you haven’t been to the Arboretum yet, you could hardly pick a better day to visit - the grounds will be filled not only with thousands of blooming daffodils, but also with vendors, crafts, games, stories, and the famous goats! We love having a pop-up at the Arboretum, and we’re so excited to add more books to the collection there and highlight our pop-up at the festival. Plus, we have truly the cutest felt daffodil flowers and a number of other fun daffodil goodies to bring! We hope to see you there.

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We’re happy to serve as the meeting place for another wonderful event with The Writers Circle! Join award-winning poet Catherine Doty for a nature-centered poetry workshop in honor of National Poetry Month and Earth Month. There will be time to share and workshop early drafts, using the group’s feedback to craft one’s words into even better poems. The event will conclude with a brief open reading to celebrate the group’s creations. Plus, there’s a 10% discount on all purchases made at the shop that night, including on the beautiful nature poetry books Catherine will be highlighting. We hope you can join us!

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It’s already time for the next event in our Nature Lovers Speaker Series with the Madison Environmental Commission, and you won’t want to miss this one! Join us at 7pm on April 20th at the Madison Community Arts Center for a discussion with Elise Howard, author of Plant This, Not That. Elise’s book highlights over 200 native plant swaps that you can make in your own garden to better support pollinators, local wildlife, and our planet. Elise will be interviewed by garden designer Sarah Hunt of Sarah Digs Plants. If you’re interested in learning about how to incorporate more native plants into your own yard, this event is a perfect place to start and we truly hope you can join us. The event is free and open to all, we just ask that you register in advance here.

sign up here

We’re very happy to be participating in an Earth Day story time this year with Mamas Who Walk! On April 22nd, join Stephanie Addyson’s wonderful group of moms who meet to go for a walk and get coffee—two of the best activities! After the walk there will be a story time at James Park with eco-focused books from The Nature of Reading, plus a discount at the shop that day for all moms and families who participate.

get your ticket here

This month we’ll be crafting these sweet mini embroidery hoops! With blocks of color already printed on the fabric and only a 4-inch hoop, these whimsical folk animals make great projects for beginners. We’ll learn all the necessary embroidery stitches at the event and get started with the project, then you’ll bring it home to finish up in your own time, ideally with a cup of tea and a vase of flowers nearby. It’s spring crafting time, hooray! Get your ticket now if you know you’d like to join us—you can choose from any of the three animal designs but there are limited numbers of each.

I can’t believe it’s April already and we’re only a few weeks away from our 4th year Earth Day anniversary! As always, we’re doing a big combo celebration on Indie Bookstore Day, which falls on Saturday, April 25th this year. Join us all day at the shop for Earth month treats, a special raffle, new merch, and so much more! We’ll get into all the details in the next newsletter, but mark your calendar now!

get your copy of the book here

Lastly, we’re so very excited for book club this month: we’re reading When the Forest Breathes: Renewal and Resilience in the Natural World by Suzanne Simard. The author of Finding the Mother Tree is back with another stunning book that dives into her critical research into the interconnectedness of forests and their cycles of regeneration, moving between details of her own life growing up in a family of loggers to the time she has spent with local Indigenous communities learning how to best steward a forest. With her evocative yet approachable writing style and concise distillation of her scientific research, this powerful book is one you won’t want to miss. You can get your ticket for book club now at this link.

Hello! It’s been a long time—three weeks in fact since I sent out my last newsletter.

The last few weeks brought the last hurrah of winter, which had already been so long and dreadful. How cold it was, and after such snow-filled months! At least now, with the passing of the equinox, spring seems to perhaps, finally, be around the corner.

Besides chilly days, March has been filled with events. We started off with our February book club meeting the first week of March, since we had to reschedule the previous week due to snow. (Because of the same snowstorm, we also had to reschedule our Birding to Change the World event, which will now be tomorrow—more on that below.)

The first Saturday of March brought one of our biggest pop-up events of the year, the Annual Conference for the Native Plant Society of NJ. We were so happy to be back for our third year selling books at the conference. It had been a while since doing a full pop-up setup, but it was fun to return to planning the best layout and bringing in some new native plant gift items we’d started carrying in the last year.

You might have spotted a T-shirt in that picture, and yes—we even designed our own native plant merch to sell at the event!

For years I had wanted to draw a design with nine book covers as the focus, ideally with native plants or other locally relevant nature elements. In the weeks leading up to the conference, I spent hours drawing out the native plants, moving between Procreate on my iPad and Adobe Illustrator on my computer. I also consulted with several friends of the shop who are native plant experts, to come up with the nine native plants that ended up in the final design. I get a bit crazy when it comes to my own art/graphic design, but finally, it all came together!

We sold out of nearly all the shirts at this event and the one we popped-up at the following week (we do have two larges and one XL left) but we’ll be reordering the shirts for the exciting native plant event we have coming up in April (you’ll have to read more on that below!).

The garment-dyed, 100% cotton, heavyweight t-shirt is screen-printed on both sides—you can see the front in the pictures above, and on the back you’ll find our logo and the shop address. If you’d like to purchase a shirt and want a particular size, just let me know in a reply to this email so I can put one aside for you when we place our next order. Or if you’d like one of the three sizes we have left, just let me know!

The next event was another lovely collaboration with NPSNJ, this time with their podcast, The WildStory, for a panel conversation with the co-hosts of the podcast, Kim Correro and Ann E. Wallace, and authors N. West Moss and Elise Howard about the latest books from Ann, West, and Elise. It was a lovely, cozy evening filled with great conversation surrounded by the beautiful setting of the Cora Hartshorn Arboretum.

Just a week later, we had our March crafting event! This was our first watercolor event, and I was a bit nervous honestly, as watercolor is a medium I don’t have much experience in. I prefer media that allow me a great deal of control when painting or drawing, which is the total opposite of watercolor! After some rocky practicing, a combination of audacity and perseverance eventually moved me into territory where I was ready for the event, which also turned out wonderfully as a table of fellow beginners and I watercolored together.

If you’re thinking, wow Hailey, what a busy month, and you still have two more events to go! And you didn’t even mention anything about running the bookstore itself! I don’t know how you do it!, you’re repeating a sentiment that I’ve heard many times at the shop, particularly since we moved into our new space nearly a year ago. And while I often reply jokingly that I just never sleep or that I also don’t know how I do it, since the beginning of 2026 I’ve had to come to terms with a very unpleasant reality: that operating at 150% all the time isn’t sustainable.

But if I love something so dearly, if I’ve poured myself into it as much as I have with The Nature of Reading, if I’m filled to the brim with ideas at all times, and perhaps worst of all, if I know that I can accomplish any of the ideas if I just had the time or resources, why can’t I always stretch myself to the limit to devote as much to it as I possibly can?

Ah yes, because physical reality cannot be ignored, despite years of my best attempts to do so. Even within the countless layers of privilege that I know I am so lucky to have, the stresses of running a small business and the daily discoveries of further horrors unfolding within this country and throughout the world will eventually form a thick, tangled mess of vines that will destroy from within if left unaddressed.

All this is to say that I’ve realized I need to build some greater balance into my life and have more assistance with running the shop. And so this month, one of the larger projects I’ve undertaken is bringing in our lovely part-time booksellers for more weekly hours, training them in the granular intricacies of inventorying and order preparation, placing stepping stones of delegation that will hopefully lead to some more time for me to focus on the things that matter most (and to rest, I suppose, if I must…).

I hope that with further help in some of the more time-consuming areas of the shop, I can devote more of my time instead to the wonderful parts of the job, like this newsletter. But, I suppose we’ll have to see. I have a tendency to think that the solution to feeling overwhelmed is to heap more onto my plate, so we’ll see how well I manage these changes. We can only hope for the best!

And with that, I should probably return to my Sunday and perhaps enjoy the sun that has just started peaking out from behind the clouds. I hope you all are having a lovely weekend, and I’ll see you back here next week.

All best wishes,

Hailey

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After rescheduling a month ago because of a snowstorm, it’s finally here: our How Birding Can Change the World event! Join us tomorrow evening at the Madison Community Arts Center for a panelist discussion featuring local birding experts with presentations inspired by one of our most favorite books, Birding to Change the World by Trish O’Kane. You can order a copy here to read here before the event or purchase a copy at our pop-up the night of the talk. The event is free and open to all, just please register here in advance so we can get a final headcount!

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The Madison Environmental Commission and I are also very excited to announce the next event in our Nature Lover’s Speaker Series: we’ll be featuring the book Plant This, Not That: Over 200 Native Plant Swaps for a Sustainable, Pollinator-Friendly Garden. Besides discussing one of our favorite topics (native plants) we’re also so lucky to be joined by the author, Elise Howard, who will share her vast knowledge in an interview with the wonderful Sarah Hunt of Sarah Digs Plants. You can purchase a copy here to read before the event, or you can get a copy at our pop-up the night of the talk. The event is free and open to all, just please register here in advance so we know how many people to expect!

1. Under Water by Tara Menon

After Marissa loses her mother at six, the most intimate relationship of her life begins. Her marine biologist father, determined to channel his grief into completing his wife’s research, whisks her across the globe to Thailand. There she meets Arielle, and a fairytale friendship takes hold. During the week, the girls live at the resort owned by Arielle’s parents; on the weekends they join the tight-knit community of researchers on a nearby island. Together the girls discover the fragile wonders of its reefs, forests, and beaches. Together they learn to dive into the deep, holding their breath for minutes at a time, as effortlessly synchronized as the manta rays they come to know by name. Together they learn to swim their way out of danger. But then comes a wave Arielle can’t outpace, leaving Marissa gutted with loss. Years later, Marissa is back in New York, adrift and haunted by the memory of her friend. Over the course of two fateful days, as another cataclysm approaches the city and the past comes flooding back, she discovers how to sustain herself in a precarious world.

2. The Weedy Garden: A Happy Habitat for Wild Friends by Margaret Renkl

This debut picture book from acclaimed and New York Times bestselling author Margaret Renkl—with collage illustrations by her brother, fine artist Billy Renkl—invites readers to observe and wonder about the various inhabitants in the vibrant ecosystem of a wildlife-friendly backyard garden. Each page turn introduces a new plant or animal friend, buzzing and dancing with quiet wonder. Billy Renkl brings the weedy garden to life through his signature mixed-media collages. The book includes backmatter with more information about the residents of the garden, eco-friendly gardening tips, and instructions on how to make your own collage art project at home or in school.

3. Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City by Kate Brown

From the eighteenth century to the twenty–first, Tiny Gardens Everywhere shares the surprising history and inspiring contemporary panorama of urban gardening: nurturing health, hope, and community. Tilled into this rich history of urban agriculture is an inspiring layer of contemporary activism. Each chapter includes contemporary stories of people from all walks of life who, in their gardens, are continuing a great tradition of mutual aid, political resistance, and bold experiments in sustainability. A manifesto for the next food revolution, Tiny Gardens Everywhere blends past and present, archive and experience, to offer a truly inspiring vision of the transformative potential of gardening and urban life.

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This month we’re reading The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary by Terry Tempest Williams. When the world seems more uncertain than ever, we need moments of devoted attention that sustain us in the deepest ways. Terry Tempest Williams introduces us to the Glorians: “ordinary, often overlooked presences—animal, plant, memory, moment—that reveal our shared vulnerability and interconnectedness with the natural world. The Glorians can be as small as an ant ferrying a coyote willow blossom to its queen or as commonplace as the night sky. But what they can collectively show us—about the radical act of attending to beauty and carrying forward against all odds—is immense.” We hope you can join us to discuss this beautiful book and the encounters with Glorians that we’ve had in our own lives.

As I mentioned above, one of the busiest pop-up events we do each year is the Native Plant Society of New Jersey Annual Conference. It was our third year at the event this year, and it was as wonderful as ever. Here are the three books that sold the most at the conference—first up is of course Larry Weaner’s Garden Revolution, as he was the keynote speaker. Then we had How Can I Help? by Doug Tallamy, who was the 2025 keynote speaker (and is also our top-selling author at the shop). Lastly, we have a newcomer to the ranks, since her book just came out earlier this month: Plant This, Not That by Elise Howard. And if you’ve read the event section, you’ll know that we’re lucky enough to have her join us this April for a talk at the Madison Community Arts Center. Learn more about these favorites and order your own copies below.

1. Garden Revolution: How Our Landscapes Can Be a Source of Environmental Change by Larry Weaner and Thomas Christopher

Larry Weaner is an icon in the world of ecological landscape design, and now his revolutionary approach is available to home gardeners. Garden Revolution shows how an ecological approach to planting can lead to beautiful gardens that buck much of conventional gardening’s counter-productive, time-consuming practices. Instead of picking the wrong plant and then weeding, irrigating, and fertilizing, Weaner advocates for choosing plants that are adapted to the soil and climate of a specific site and letting them naturally evolve over time. This lushly-photographed reference is for anyone looking for a better, smarter way to garden.

2. How Can I Help? Saving Nature with Your Yard by Douglas W. Tallamy

In How Can I Help?, Tallamy tackles the questions commonly asked at his popular lectures and shares compelling and actionable answers that will help gardeners and homeowners take the next step in their ecological journey. Topics range from ecology, evolution, biodiversity and conservation to restoration, native plants, invasive species, pest control, and supporting wildlife at home. Tallamy keenly understands that most people want to take part in conservation efforts but often feel powerless to do so as individuals. But one person can make a difference, and How Can I Help? details how. Whether by reducing your lawn, planting a handful of native species, or allowing leaves to sit untouched, you will be inspired and empowered to join millions of other like-minded people to become the future of backyard conservation.

3. Plant This, Not That: Over 200 Native Plant Swaps for a More Sustainable, Pollinator-Friendly Garden by Elise Howard

These days, home gardeners know that many traditional, non-native garden plants—like English ivy, barberry, and burning bush—don’t support our bees, butterflies, birds, and other creatures. And that native plants are more likely to thrive, because they evolved as part of the local ecology, so they often require less fussy maintenance and don’t depend on pesticides and fertilizers. But gardeners ready to make the switch may ask: Where do I begin? And how do I find the best native plants for my landscape? Plant This, Not That considers some of the most common non-native (and often, invasive) plants in North American gardens and suggests substitutions for more beneficial and equally beautiful natives. Each native plant listing includes a full-color photo, along with sun, water, and soil requirements; ornamental features (including bloom time and color and whether the plant has berries, fruit, and/or fall color); and the pollinators known to depend on and support that plant. Accompanying maps show every plant’s locally native range, down to the county level. The book also features an overview of how native plants contribute to our local ecosystems, where to shop for them, advice on maintaining a mostly native garden, and resources to learn more about native planting.

I’m here with a quick note today before sharing information about our March events! Despite an incredibly snowy start to the week (which resulted in the rescheduling of two events, more on that below), it finally looks like spring might very possibly be hiding just around the corner. We can only hope! It’s been lovely to see so many more of you at the shop these past few days, when the sun has inspired us all to get out and recharge before the cloudy, snow-filled days return for winter’s last hurrah.

We hope to see you at one of our collaborative events this month, or here at the shop for our book club and March crafting event (we’re doing mini paintings!).

Wishing you all a sun-filled start to meteorological spring,

Hailey

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We’re pleased to be returning to the NPSNJ’s Annual Meeting this year! It’ll be our third year selling books at this wonderful conference—it’s always one of our favorite yearly events. If you’re not a member of the society yet but love native plants, I highly recommend you join and attend the conference. We’ll be there doing a book signing with keynote speaker Larry Weaner and WildStory Podcast co-host Ann E. Wallace, and as always we’ll be selling a whole array of all our best native plant books.

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Just a few days after the Annual Conference, we’ll be popping up with The Native Plant Society once again! This time, we’ll be at the beautiful Cora Hartshorn Arboretum to sell books for The WildStory’s Season 4 Premiere event. Join the podcast hosts Kim Correro and Ann Wallace in conversation with Elise Howard and N. West Moss about their recent books and their connections to the natural world. We’ll also be having a signing with N. West Moss, Ann, and Elise after the event!

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We’re very excited to announce our March crafting event: it’s our first ever evening of painting! I know we’ve had some more challenging crafts lately, so I wanted to one that was a bit more relaxed to celebrate the start of spring. When I came across this delightful zinnia watercolor project, I knew it was the perfect pick for our next crafting event where we herald the return of gardening weather. I hope you can join us! Spots are limited, so do get your ticket now if you know you’d like to come.

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NEW DATE: We had to reschedule due to last Sunday’s snowstorm, but we’re excited to announce the new date for our event: March 23rd! Join us for a panelist discussion featuring local birding experts and discussing one of our most favorite books, Birding to Change the World by Trish O’Kane. You can order a copy here to read here before the event or purchase a copy at our pop-up the night of the talk. The event is free and open to all, just please register here in advance so we know how many people to expect!

get your book here

For March we’ll be reading The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary by Terry Tempest Williams. When the world seems more uncertain than ever, we need moments of devoted attention that sustain us in the deepest ways. Terry Tempest Williams introduces us to the Glorians: “ordinary, often overlooked presences—animal, plant, memory, moment—that reveal our shared vulnerability and interconnectedness with the natural world. The Glorians can be as small as an ant ferrying a coyote willow blossom to its queen or as commonplace as the night sky. But what they can collectively show us—about the radical act of attending to beauty and carrying forward against all odds—is immense.” We hope you can join us to discuss this beautiful book and the encounters with Glorians that we’ve had in our own lives.

Welcome back to another newsletter—I hope you’re having a lovely Valentine’s weekend.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about rereading books, perhaps because in the past few months I’ve been rereading more than ever.

It started with a few middle grade graphic novels that I sometimes read to help me fall asleep at night. Revisiting favorites from earlier in the year helped me make it through the stress of the holiday season. Then when I got sick in December, I reread some favorite novels from my childhood in those long nights when I could barely sleep.

Most recently, I’m about to finish rereading a hefty trilogy—His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman. This is the kind of rereading that I probably wouldn’t have undertaken in the past: the three books total over 1,100 pages, and the constant awareness of my limited time on this earth would have prevented me from making such a commitment. How could I reread something so long when there are so many other things I want to read?!

But I was so craving that particular story, the thrilling adventures, the clever twists, Lyra’s bright trickster energy, and its central plot line, the reinterpretation of Milton’s Paradise Lost. More than all those things, I wanted to return to the trilogy’s appreciation for the physical world, its musings on the love and connection we have with the earth and our own physicality that is inherently part of it. In times like these, when we engage more than ever with the intangible worlds technology presents us with, feeling embodied and connected to the physical world is more important than ever if we are to bring about a more just and prosperous future for our planet.

In contemplating rereading the series, I also thought about my relationship with other forms of media. I rewatch TV shows and movies all the time, listen to albums I love a thousand times over. I definitely enjoy these things as “comfort media,” but for some reason that concept never reached books—I always saw the comfort of books as the comfort of reading as an act, rather than the comfort inherent in specific texts. Perhaps this is because of my bookseller nature, my pressing awareness of just how many amazing books there are out there.

But with His Dark Materials I started thinking, if I know exactly what I want to read, why should I put it off in the name of reading something new? Even if I were to read a new book, I’d only ever make the most minuscule of dents in the unimaginably massive mountains of all the books that have ever been published. Honestly, even if I were to make a truly comprehensive list of all the books I’ve seen in my 28 years that I really want to read at some point, just that list would number in the thousands and certainly not be achievable in one lifetime.

Every decision on how we spend our time and attention is simultaneously a decision not to be placing our attention elsewhere. It’s the bittersweet reality of our limited time on this planet. And so if I know I would find comfort and joy in revisiting cherished paths of thought by rereading His Dark Materials, why shouldn’t I? No matter what decision I make, I’ll only be able to enjoy a fraction of all the books out there, and accepting that fact helps me decide what to read next in a way that best aligns with my intuition.

I’m almost done with the trilogy now, and it was just as powerful as I remember it. Every time we reread a book, new things stand out. Of course, after we read a book certain facts or impressions often remain in our mind, but so much of the power of books lies in the experience of reading them. And that power is endlessly regenerative—every reading experience brings new insights to light. This year, I hope to hold this knowledge close and let myself read the things that will fulfill me, regardless of whether I’ve read them before.

Are you a rereader? Or do you feel the unending pressure of your TBR? I’d love to know!

Whether you’re reading something new or revisiting an old favorite, I hope you have a day filled with stories. We’re open at the shop until 4pm today if you’d like to stop by to start your next reading experience.

All best wishes,

Hailey

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It’s our first joint event of the year with the Madison Environmental Commission! This month we’ll be co-hosting a panelist discussion featuring local birding experts and discussing one of our most favorite books, Birding to Change the World by Trish O’Kane. You can order a copy here to read here before the event or purchase a copy at our pop-up the night of the talk. The event is free and open to all, just please register here in advance so we know how many people to expect!

learn more here

We’re pleased to be returning to the NPSNJ’s Annual Meeting this year! It’ll be our third year selling books at this wonderful conference—it’s always one of our favorite yearly events. If you’re not a member of the society yet but love native plants, I highly recommend you join and attend the conference. We’ll be there doing a book signing with keynote speaker Larry Weaner and WildStory Podcast co-host Ann E. Wallace, and as always we’ll be selling a whole array of all our best native plant books.

1. Growing Papaya Trees: Nurturing Indigenous Roots During Climate Displacement by Jessica Hernandez

Not every environmental problem is a result of climate change, but every environmental and climate change problem is a result of colonialism. Dr. Jessica Hernandez offers readers an Indigenous, Global-South lens on the climate crisis, delivering a compelling and urgent exploration of its causes—and its costs. She shares how the impacts of colonial climate catastrophe—from warming oceans to forced displacement of settler ontologies—can only be addressed at the root if we reorient toward Indigenous science and follow the lead of Indigenous peoples and communities. Dr. Hernandez asks: what does it mean to be Indigenous when we’re separated from our lands? How do we nurture future generations knowing they, too, will have to live away from their ancestral places? She illuminates that cultures are not lost, even amid genocide, turmoil, war, and climate displacement—and shows us how to be better kin to each other against the ecological violence, colonial oppression, and distorted status quo of the Global North.

2. Black Bear: A Story of Siblinghood and Survival by Trina Moyles

When Trina Moyles was five years old, her father, a wildlife biologist known in Peace River as “the bear guy,” brought home an orphaned black bear cub for a night before sending it to the Calgary Zoo. This brief but unforgettable encounter spurred Trina’s lifelong fascination with Ursus americanus. As a child roaming the shores of the Peace in the footsteps of her beloved older brother, Brendan, she understood bears to be invisible entities: always present but mostly hidden and worthy of respect. Growing up during the oil boom of the 1990s, the threats in the siblings’ hard-drinking resource town were more human, dividing them from a natural reverence for the land, and eventually, from each other. After years of working for human rights organizations, Trina returned to northern Alberta for a job as a fire tower lookout, while Brendan worked in the oil sands, vulnerable to a boom-and-bust economy and substance addiction. Over four summers, Trina begins to move beyond fear and observe the extraordinary essence of the maligned black bear—a keystone species who is as subject to the environmental consequences of the oil economy as humans. At the same time, she searches for common ground with Brendan on the land that bonded them.

3. Clearing the Air: A Hopeful Guide to Solving Climate Change in 50 Questions and Answers by Hannah Ritchie

Clear, simple answers to the most common and vexing questions about climate change that we can take action on right now. We can’t afford to delay climate action, but with all the shouting and disagreement, it’s hard to know where to turn. In Clearing the Air, data scientist and bestselling author Hannah Ritchie answers 50 key climate questions once and for all, clearing the air so we can take action and fix things. The first piece of good news is that Ritchie is here with answers and the steps we need to take right now. Using simple, clear data, she tackles questions such as: Is it too late? Won’t we run out of minerals? Aren’t we too polarized? The second piece of good news: The truth is far more hopeful than you might think. We’re at a critical moment for our planet, and getting the facts straight is step one. But even more crucial is feeling hopeful about what we can do next. The third piece of good news? We already have many of the solutions we need to create a more sustainable planet for future generations.

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This month we’re reading When Trees Testify: Science, Wisdom, History and America’s Black Botanical Legacy, a captivating blend of memoir, science writing, and history from plant biologist Beronda L. Montgomery. Learn more about the deeply rooted history of Black botanical expertise and the ways that knowledge has shaped the United States since its very foundation. Writing about everything from Pecan trees being domesticated by an enslaved African named Antoine to the use of willow bark as medicine, Montgomery weaves together the rich history of Black botany, her own deeply personal experiences, and her wide-ranging scientific knowledge into this beautiful book.

Feeling trapped by this endlessly cold and snowy winter? One of the best ways to make the most of staying indoors is to pick up a new craft or hobby. A lot of people who visit the shop tell me how they’ve always wanted to get into sewing their own clothes, and to that I say, now is the perfect time! With the textile industry being one of the main drivers of global warming, having a self-made, self-mendable wardrobe is one of the best things we can do as individuals for the health of our planet. These three books make it easy to start making simple pieces on your sewing machine or sewing by hand.

1. How to Sew Clothes: Learn with Intuitive, Super-Hackable Patterns by Amelia Greenhall and Amy Bornman

Whether you are just learning how to sew or want to reignite your excitement for sewing, How to Sew Clothes makes sewing feel possible. Amelia and Amy’s illustrated guidance and conversational how-tos feel just like an inviting, in-person workshop. This book will have you wanting to sew every project (and will give you all the tools to make it happen). It is also a great read, even when you aren’t in the mood to sew. How many sewing books can say that? Inside, you’ll find an envelope full of pattern sheets and very detailed instructions to guide you through the process of making simple tops, dresses, a jacket, and a coat that will become wardrobe essentials. (Patterns have bust circumferences 32–62” / 81–157 cm.) Several of All Well’s bestselling, downloadable sewing patterns are included, in print for the first time! Pick up this book and learn essential skills such as how to choose fabrics, read patterns, and cut out pattern pieces and sew them together, as well as how to backstitch, assess fit, and learn from what you make. There are also instructions for making bags that will fit you and your style just right. How to Sew Clothes will help you learn to make clothes you love to wear—and have fun in the process.

2. The Handsewn Wardrobe: A Complete Guide to Making Your Own Clothes from Patternmaking to the Finishing Stitches by Louisa Owen Sonstroem

Discover the slow, quiet joy of sewing clothes by hand in this one-of-kind guide. Featuring step-by-step, illustrated instructions, this hand-sewing course-in-a-book shows you how to create nine wardrobe staples, including a t-shirt, button-up, and jeans, using simple hand-sewing and hand-stitching techniques. Author Louisa Owen Sonstroem shares her sustainable, empowering, and portable craft with gentle encouragement and guidance. Sewists of all experience levels will learn how to draft a pattern to fit custom measurements, select and cut fabric, and construct each garment without using a sewing machine.

3. Zero Waste Patterns: 20 Projects to Sew Your Own Wardrobe by Birgitta Helmersson

Zero Waste Patterns offers a modern approach to sustainable sewing. Using natural fabrics and core sewing techniques, learn how to stitch without waste and make a scandi-style collection of 20 garments. Zero waste pattern cutting is a bit like a puzzle. You use a pre-determined length of fabric end to end by strategically planning your pattern pieces so that everything is used and then draw them onto the fabric. By using this unique ‘paperless’ method you can eliminate both textile and paper waste from your sewing projects and take the fear out of learning to self draft and sew your own clothing. This book includes 5 simple zero waste pattern blocks – a t-shirt, skirt, tank top, shirt and trousers. These can then be used to make a further 15 projects by making simple changes or mixing and matching your blocks into new designs, and comes with pattern layout instructions and templates to make sizes US 2-26.

I’m here with a quick note today before sharing information about our February events. We’d love to see you especially at our Valentine’s crafting event, and at our first talk of the year with the Madison Environmental Commission! Compared to a bustling January, this month is a bit quieter but it will be a good time to start preparing for the return of spring at the end of March.

Thank you all so much for the support you’ve shown for our last newsletter and for us participating in the national shutdown on Friday. I have a number of plans to highlight more environmental and social justice work in our shop ecosystem this year—there’s more to come very soon.

I hope you all have a peaceful if frigid Sunday!

All best wishes,

Hailey

learn more here

This year we’re once again participating in Madison’s third annual Chocolate Walk! All around town you can enjoy chocolate-making fun, cozy hot chocolate and special treats from participating businesses. At The Nature of Reading, you can pick up some special Valentine’s blind dates with a book, as well as get a free mini vegan chocolate bar with every purchase.

get your ticket here

We’re back with another crafting event for the month! This month we’ll have our first ever crochet event—we’ll be making this lovely mini heart garland, which makes a perfect decoration for Valentine’s Day and beyond. The kit even comes with a little box for gifting so you can give a garland to a loved one! We’d love to see you there.

sign up here

It’s our first joint event of the year with the Madison Environmental Commission! This month we’ll be co-hosting a panelist discussion featuring local birding experts and discussing one of our most favorite books, Birding to Change the World by Trish O’Kane. You can order a copy here to read here before the event or purchase a copy at our pop-up the night of the talk. The event is free and open to all, just please register here in advance so we know how many people to expect!

get your book here

For February we’ll be reading When Trees Testify: Science, Wisdom, History and America’s Black Botanical Legacy, a captivating blend of memoir, science writing, and history from plant biologist Beronda L. Montgomery. Learn more about the deeply rooted history of Black botanical expertise and the ways that knowledge has shaped the United States since its very foundation. Writing about everything from Pecan trees being domesticated by an enslaved African named Antoine to the use of willow bark as medicine, Montgomery weaves together the rich history of Black botany, her own deeply personal experiences, and her wide-ranging scientific knowledge into this beautiful book.

Welcome back to another newsletter.

It feels hard to write anything at the moment, watching the snow falling heavy outside our windows and reading news about ICE’s latest terrors spread throughout the US and within our own county.

Still, I wanted to send out this newsletter to remind everyone, remind myself, that building a better world is possible. One where children are not kidnapped, people are not murdered in the streets, and where we are not repeatedly told that what we can see with our own eyes is not the truth. The books recommended at the end of this newsletter acknowledge the horrors of our world while laying out the paths we can take to usher in a new, more just, reality.

Staying inside all day with the snowstorm can easily devolve into doom-scrolling. In addition to reading, here are three things you can do instead (picking even one is an amazing step in converting distress into action)

• Follow Cosecha NJ on Instagram and save their number (888-347-3767 for Morris County) to report seeing any ICE activity

• Call 202-224-3121 and ask to be connected to Cory Booker and Andy Kim (two separate calls) or your relevant senators if you live outside of NJ. Use this script to let them know you don’t support the further funding of ICE that the Senate will soon vote on

• Follow Mutual Morris (or your local mutual aid group) to learn more about their work and what they need to better support our communities

No matter what the near future holds, we can get through this together. Please join us at one of our upcoming free events, or stop by the store this week at any point to talk more about these topics in person.

All best wishes,

Hailey

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We’re pleased to be hosting another Beginning Memoir class this winter led by the lovely author Liz Alterman. From The Writer’s Circle website: “Every person has a story. What is yours? Memoir writing is the process of adapting your true-life experiences in a way that reads like fiction. Whether your writing goal is personal, in essay form, or an entire book, this class will give you the tools you need to develop and strengthen your writing process. Through prompts, supportive round-table discussions, and constructive critique, we will explore how to structure stories, develop the skills that bring them to life, and show how to enhance your writing.” Sign up here to join the class—it will be meeting at the shop every Monday evening.

Even if you weren’t able to make it last two meetings, we’d still absolutely love to see you this Wednesday at Mutual Morris’s next discussion of Active Hope, Part 3. While the vastness of the planetary polycrisis can often be overwhelming, working together to support the people closest to you in your community is one of the best ways to be able to weather any storm and one of the most effective ways to make a difference in the climate crisis. Learn more about mutual aid and how to turn eco-anxiety into active hope with us this month. These events are free and open to all—just reply to this email if you’d like to join us so we can get an estimate of attendees beforehand. We hope to see you there!

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Next weekend is the first meeting in our exciting collaboration with Cora Hartshorn Arboretum & Bird Sanctuary—a new book club called The ArboReaders (could they have chosen a more perfect name?). Join us each season to read a nature book and have the coziest of discussions at the beautiful Arboretum. For the winter season, we’re reading The Courage of Birds: And the Often Surprising Ways in Which They Survive Winter by Pete Dunne. You can pick up a copy of the book at the shop if you’d like to buy one, but the event is free and open to all! Sign up here.

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We’re back with another crafting event for next month! This month we’ll have our first ever crochet event—we’ll be making this lovely mini heart garland, which makes a perfect decoration for Valentine’s Day and beyond. The kit even comes with a little box for gifting so you can give a garland to a loved one! We’d love to see you there next month.

1. Under the Sky We Make: How to Be Human in a Warming World by Kimberly Nicholas

In her astonishing, bestselling book Under the Sky We Make, Nicholas does for climate science what Michael Pollan did more than a decade ago for the food on our plate: offering a hopeful, clear-eyed, and somehow also hilarious guide to effecting real change, starting in our own lives. Saving ourselves from climate apocalypse will require radical shifts within each of us, to effect real change in our society and culture. But it can be done. It requires, Dr. Nicholas argues, belief in our own agency and value, alongside a deep understanding that no one will ever hand us power—we’re going to have to seize it for ourselves.

2. Held: Essays in Belonging by Kathryn Nuernberger

Here is a collection about living in and with the consequences of terrible mistakes—Held contemplates our collective experiences of loss in an age of climate change and mass extinctions, as well as more personal tragedies. Each essay in this book describes a remarkable instance of symbiotic mutualism: bobtail squid host glow-in-the-dark bacteria behind their eyes so they can camouflage with moonlight on the water; there is a surprisingly erotic encounter between ants and a rove beetle; beavers and willow trees together turn deserts to verdant wetlands; and many more. To read Held is to be reminded of one’s humanity and of our interconnectedness with the world that surrounds us.

3. When Things Fall Apart: Letters to Activists in Crisis edited by Kelly Hayes

In social movements, some heartbreaks are all but inevitable. Campaigns will be lost. Mental health crises will occur. Social ills, like gender-based violence, will manifest themselves in movement spaces. People will experience profound personal losses. Grief, alienation, and despair can grind us under. Sometimes, we need accompaniment. Sometimes, we need to be met where we’re at by a caring voice of experience. Read This When Things Fall Apart is a care package for activists and organizers building power under fascistic, demoralizing conditions. It’s an outstretched hand, offering history lessons, personal anecdotes, and practical advice about how to navigate the woes of justice work. A survival guide for the heart, this is a book for activists to keep close, and to share with co-strugglers in need.

We have our January book club meeting on Tuesday, but here is our book for February!

For February we’ll be reading When Trees Testify: Science, Wisdom, History and America’s Black Botanical Legacy, a captivating blend of memoir, science writing, and history from plant biologist Beronda L. Montgomery. Learn more about the deeply rooted history of Black botanical expertise and the ways that knowledge has shaped the United States since its very foundation. Writing about everything from Pecan trees being domesticated by an enslaved African named Antoine to the use of willow bark as medicine, Montgomery weaves together the rich history of Black botany, her own deeply personal experiences, and her wide-ranging scientific knowledge into this beautiful book.

sign up here

We can move forward from these times to build a better world.

Let’s dream together.

1. What If We Get It Right by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson

Sometimes the bravest thing we can do while facing an existential crisis is imagine life on the other side. This provocative and joyous book maps an inspiring landscape of possible climate futures. Through clear-eyed essays and vibrant conversations, infused with data, poetry, and art, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson guides us through solutions and possibilities at the nexus of science, policy, culture, and justice. If you haven’t yet been able to picture a transformed and replenished world—or see yourself, your loved ones, and your community in it— this book is for you. If you haven’t yet found your role in shaping this new world, or you’re not sure how we can actually get there, this book is for you. With frankness, humor, and humanity, Ayana invites readers to ask and answer this crucial question, together: What if we get it right?

2. A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit

The most startling thing about disasters, according to award-winning author Rebecca Solnit, is not merely that so many people rise to the occasion, but that they do so with joy. That joy reveals an ordinarily unmet yearning for community, purposefulness, and meaningful work that disaster often provides. A Paradise Built in Hell is an investigation of the moments of altruism, resourcefulness, and generosity that arise amid disaster’s grief and disruption and considers their implications for everyday life. It points to a new vision of what society could become—one that is less authoritarian and fearful, more collaborative and local.

3. How to Fall in Love with the Future by Rob Hopkins

What would our activism look like if time travel were possible? How to Fall in Love with the Future is the result of Hopkins’s deep dive into the people and movements throughout history who have used visions of the future to inspire positive change on a large and dramatic scale. From the life and writings of musician Sun Ra and the history of Black utopian movements to the latest neuroscience on what goes on in our minds—and hearts—when we “time travel,” Hopkins brings essential new thinking to anyone overwhelmed with dread and anxiety for the future. He asks us to consider: what would the world look like if we all got to work imagining—and then building—a world we were deeply in love with?

4. Active Hope by Joanna Macy & Chris Johnstone

The challenges we face can be difficult even to think about. Climate change, war, political polarization, economic upheaval, and the dying back of nature together create a planetary emergency of overwhelming proportions. This revised, tenth anniversary edition of Active Hope shows us how to strengthen our capacity to face these crises so that we can respond with unexpected resilience and creative power. Drawing on decades of teaching an empowerment approach known as the Work That Reconnects, the authors guide us through a transformational process informed by mythic journeys, modern psychology, spirituality, and holistic science. This process equips us with tools to face the mess we’re in and play our role in the collective transition, or Great Turning, to a life-sustaining society.

5. Somebody Should Do Something by Michael Brownstein, Alex Madva, and Daniel Kelly

Changing the world is difficult. One reason is that the most important problems, like climate change, racism, and poverty, are structural. They emerge from our collective practices: laws, economies, history, culture, norms, and built environments. The dilemma is that there is no way to make structural change without individual people making different—more structure-facing—decisions. In Somebody Should Do Something, Michael Brownstein, Alex Madva, and Daniel Kelly show us how we can connect our personal choices to structural change and why individual choices matter, though not in the way people usually think. Neither a how-to manual nor an activist’s guide, Somebody Should Do Something pairs stories with science (plus some jokes) to help readers recognize their own power, turning resignation about climate change and racial injustice into actions that transform the world.

6. Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown

Inspired by Octavia Butler’s explorations of our human relationship to change, Emergent Strategy is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help designed to shape the futures we want to live. Change is constant. The world is in a continual state of flux. It is a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Rather than steel ourselves against such change, this book invites us to feel, map, assess, and learn from the swirling patterns around us in order to better understand and influence them as they happen. This is a resolutely materialist “spirituality” based equally on science and science fiction, a visionary incantation to transform that which ultimately transforms us.

Welcome back to another newsletter!

January is often portrayed as the time to get started with dozens of new goals and resolutions, but we’ve just barely entered winter and the natural world is still at rest.

Looking at the calendar as 2026 spreads ahead of us, I feel eager as ever to build new organizational systems and dive into shop improvement projects and complete my miles-long to-do list. But the busy holiday season has only just passed, and I’m learning (slowly, with much difficulty) that running at 100% all the time isn’t exactly sustainable in the longterm.

And so I look out the window and see the trees with their bare branches, the dried stems that line the yard, the desaturated landscape. The world around me is still resting, and maybe that means I can take a slow start to my year as well.

I hope you are having a peaceful beginning to the new year, doing what you can to kindle and protect your hope as we face 2026 together.

All best wishes,

Hailey

First up this month, we’re hosting Mutual Morris’s reading and discussions of Active Hope, meeting on the last three Wednesdays of the month. While the vastness of the planetary polycrisis can often be overwhelming, working together to support the people closest to you in your community is one of the best ways to be able to weather any storm and one of the most effective ways to make a difference in the climate crisis. Learn more about mutual aid and how to turn eco-anxiety into active hope with us this month. These events are free and open to all—we’ll be discussing Part 1 of the book on January 14th. Just reply to this email if you’d like to join us so we can get an estimate of attendees beforehand. We hope to see you there!

get your ticket here

We’re back with our first crafting event for 2026! If you’ve been curious about basket making but have been unsure of where to start, the Josie Mini Rope Bowl from Flax & Twine is the perfect project to start with—it’s ideal for beginners and seasoned makers alike. We’ll complete one mini bowl during the event, and you’ll be able to make a second bowl with the rest of the materials at home. January is a time for new beginnings—if you’ve written new year goals of spending more time on handicrafts, making connections with others in your community, or trying those things you’ve always wanted to try, we’d truly love for you to join us at this event.

sign up here

We’re pleased to be hosting another Beginning Memoir class this winter led by the lovely author Liz Alterman! From The Writer’s Circle website: “Every person has a story. What is yours? Memoir writing is the process of adapting your true-life experiences in a way that reads like fiction. Whether your writing goal is personal, in essay form, or an entire book, this class will give you the tools you need to develop and strengthen your writing process. Through prompts, supportive round-table discussions, and constructive critique, we will explore how to structure stories, develop the skills that bring them to life, and show how to enhance your writing.” Sign up here to join the class—it will be meeting at the shop every Monday evening.

get your ticket here

We’re so happy to announce this exciting collaboration with Cora Hartshorn Arboretum & Bird Sanctuary—a new book club called The ArboReaders! (Could they have chosen a more perfect name?!) Join us each season to read a nature book and have the coziest of discussions at the beautiful Arboretum. For the winter season, we’re reading The Courage of Birds: And the Often Surprising Ways in Which They Survive Winter by Pete Dunne. You can pick up a copy of the book at the shop if you’d like to buy one, but the event is free and open to all! Sign up here.

1. Evergreen: The Trees that Shaped America by Trent Preszler

Blending cinematic detail with compelling ecological and cultural history, Evergreen explores the hidden tensions between nature, commerce, and spirituality that have confounded humanity for millennia. Cornell University professor Trent Preszler weaves together a captivating story of humanity’s deeply rooted relationship with evergreens, revealing how the trees shaped economies, launched cultural movements, and propelled America’s rise to global prominence. At once timeless and urgently relevant, Evergreen delivers a stirring reflection on the quiet power of trees, challenging us to reconsider the delicate balance between our restless ambition and the living world that sustains us.

2. Wilding: How to Bring Wildlife Back, An Illustrated Guide by Isabella Tree, Illustrated by Angela Harding

An inspiring story of hope showing what happens when you let nature take the lead. This stunningly beautiful gift book written by Isabella Tree tells the story of the Knepp Estate in West Sussex. It is illustrated in full color with lino prints and watercolors by Angela Harding and photographs from Knepp. Knepp is now home to some of the rarest and most beautiful creatures in the UK, including nightingales, kingfishers, turtle doves and peregrine falcons, hazel dormice and harvest mice, scarce chaser dragonflies and purple emperor butterflies. This is the story of Knepp, and a guide telling you how to bring wildlife back where you live.

3. Lone Wolf: Walking the Line Between Civilization and Wildness by Adam Weymouth

In 2011, a wolf named Slavc left his home territory of Slovenia for a wide-ranging journey across the Alps. Tracked by a GPS collar, he traveled over 1,200 miles, where he would mate with a female wolf on a walkabout of her own—the only two wolves for hundreds of square miles—and start the first pack to call the Italian Alps home in more than a century. A decade later and there are more than a hundred wolves in the area, the result of their remarkable meeting. Now, journalist Adam Weymouth follows Slavc’s path on foot, and in doing so, interrogates the fears and realities of those living on land that is being repopulated by wolves; a metaphor for economic, political, and climate upheaval in a region that is seeing a centuries-old way of life being upended. Sharply observed, searching, and written in poetic and precise prose, Lone Wolf explores the thorny connection between humans and nature, and indeed between borders themselves, and presses us to consider this much-discussed creature anew.

sign up here

It’s the first meeting of the year for The Nature of Reading Book Club! This month we’re reading Helm by Sarah Hall—a unique, sweeping novel about a monumental force of a wind in Northern England. Follow Helm’s mischievous, otherworldly voice as it brings you from the dawn to time to the present, sharing stories all along the way about the countless humans who have lived beneath it. This eco-fiction read reflects with immense style on the timeless relationship between humans and weather.

This week I asked our booksellers Alison and Jo what their favorite book club book from 2025 was. Find all three of our picks below!

Jo’s Pick: The Place of Tides by James Rebanks

Jo says: “I read this book by the ocean and while I highly recommend that reading experience, the writing style was so descriptive and immersive that it’s not required. I loved learning about Norwegian island life, the eider ducks who live there, and the women who care for them. It was a peaceful read with just the right amount of adventure. At the same time a meditation on the preservation of traditions and a revitalization of hope, The Place of Tides was my favorite book club read from the past year. I would recommend this book to anyone in need of a pick-me up or some island atmosphere.”

Learn more about The Place of Tides and order your copy here.

Alison’s Pick: Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Alison says: “This short novel was the winner of the Booker prize in 2024. Set on the International Space Station as it orbits the Earth (sixteen times) over the course of 24 hours, it gives a unique viewpoint of our planet. The rhythm of the chapters was calming, almost meditative. And it is so beautifully written, with precision and care given to every word, it reads like poetry. A profound read that made me appreciate Earth and all its wonders in a new way.”

Learn more about Orbital and order your copy here.

Hailey’s Pick: We Will Be Jaguars by Nemonte Nenquimo

Hailey says: “Last January, I was looking for next month’s book club read. I was between a few options, so I decided to read a few chapters of We Will Be Jaguars to see if it felt like the right choice, and I couldn’t stop reading until well after midnight. The story, the voice, the imagery—it instantly hooked me in. We Will Be Jaguars shines in each area it touches—in conveying the intense joys and tragedies of Nemonte’s childhood, in sharing glimpses of the powerful ancestral traditions of the Waorani peoples, in demonstrating the strength and impact of Indigenous-led environmentalism. Even though my reading list stretches far into the hundreds at this point, it’s one of the books I know for certain I’ll be rereading this year.”

Learn more about We Will Be Jaguars and order your copy here.

Happy New Year! It’s 2026!

Thank you all so much for your kind words about Mario’s last newsletter—we both really appreciate all the sweet responses we’ve received.

Despite the quiet, wintry nature of January, we have many exciting events and collaborations coming up this month! Learn more about all of them below.

Plus, I wanted to include a list of the books that sold most in 2025, some from the events we helped organize or popped up at, and some perennial favorites from the storefront. It was so fun to see what was popular in the whirlwind year that was 2025, and I hope you enjoy seeing everyone’s favorites as well.

Without further ado, happy newsletter reading!

All best wishes,

Hailey

First up this month, we’re hosting Mutual Morris’s reading and discussions of Active Hope, meeting on the last three Wednesdays of the month. While the vastness of the planetary polycrisis can often be overwhelming, working together to support the people closest to you in your community is one of the best ways to be able to weather any storm and one of the most effective ways to make a difference in the climate crisis. Learn more about mutual aid and how to turn eco-anxiety into active hope with us this month. These events are free and open to all—we’ll be discussing Part 1 of the book on January 14th. Just reply to this email if you’d like to join us so we can get an estimate of attendees beforehand. We hope to see you there!

get your ticket here

We’re back with our first crafting event for 2026! If you’ve been curious about basket making but have been unsure of where to start, the Josie Mini Rope Bowl from Flax & Twine is the perfect project to start with—it’s ideal for beginners and seasoned makers alike. We’ll complete one mini bowl during the event, and you’ll be able to make a second bowl with the rest of the materials at home. January is a time for new beginnings—if you’ve written new year goals of spending more time on handicrafts, making connections with others in your community, or trying those things you’ve always wanted to try, we’d truly love for you to join us at this event.

sign up here

We’re pleased to be hosting another Beginning Memoir class this winter led by the lovely author Liz Alterman! From The Writer’s Circle website: “Every person has a story. What is yours? Memoir writing is the process of adapting your true-life experiences in a way that reads like fiction. Whether your writing goal is personal, in essay form, or an entire book, this class will give you the tools you need to develop and strengthen your writing process. Through prompts, supportive round-table discussions, and constructive critique, we will explore how to structure stories, develop the skills that bring them to life, and show how to enhance your writing.” Sign up here to join the class—it will be meeting at the shop every Monday evening.

get your book here

It’s the first meeting of the year for The Nature of Reading Book Club! This month we’re reading Helm by Sarah Hall—a unique, sweeping novel about a monumental force of a wind in Northern England. Follow Helm’s mischievous, otherworldly voice as it brings you from the dawn to time to the present, sharing stories all along the way about the countless humans who have lived beneath it. This eco-fiction read reflects with immense style on the timeless relationship between humans and weather.

get your ticket here

We’re so happy to announce this exciting collaboration with Cora Hartshorn Arboretum & Bird Sanctuary—a new book club called The ArboReaders! (Could they have chosen a more perfect name?!) Join us each season to read a nature book and have the coziest of discussions at the beautiful Arboretum. For the winter season, we’re reading The Courage of Birds: And the Often Surprising Ways in Which They Survive Winter by Pete Dunne. You can pick up a copy of the book at the shop if you’d like to buy one, but the event is free and open to all! Sign up here.

Time for our top books from 2025! This year we were lucky to participate in and help organize so many wonderful events (including popping up at the NPSNJ Annual Conference where we sold books with Douglas Tallamy). We especially loved the Nature Lover’s Speaker Series we were able to put on with the Madison Environmental Commission—there’s more to come in that series soon!

I’m so grateful to the people who came out for the Speaker Series to learn more about the world around us and to show support for the shop and the MEC. Because of the popularity of these events and others we sold books at this year, I’ve first highlighted our the top 5 books from collaborative events, followed by our top 10 books sold regularly at the shop. I hope you enjoy seeing what our readers loved this year as much as I have!

2025’s Top Books from Events

1. How Can I Help? by Douglas W. Tallamy

In How Can I Help?, Tallamy tackles the questions commonly asked at his popular lectures and shares compelling and actionable answers that will help gardeners and homeowners take the next step in their ecological journey. Topics range from ecology, evolution, biodiversity and conservation to restoration, native plants, invasive species, pest control, and supporting wildlife at home. Tallamy keenly understands that most people want to take part in conservation efforts but often feel powerless to do so as individuals. But one person can make a difference, and How Can I Help? details how.

2. Nature’s Best Hope by Douglas W. Tallamy

Nature’s Best Hope shows how homeowners everywhere can turn their yards into conservation corridors that provide wildlife habitats. Because this approach relies on the initiatives of private individuals, it is immune from the whims of government policy. Even more important, it’s practical, effective, and easy—you will walk away with specific suggestions you can incorporate into your own yard. If you’re concerned about doing something good for the environment, Nature’s Best Hope is the blueprint you need. By acting now, you can help preserve our precious wildlife—and the planet—for future generations.

3. Night Magic by Leigh Ann Henion

In this glorious celebration of the night, nature writer Leigh Ann Henion invites us to leave our well-lit homes, step outside, and embrace the dark as a profoundly beautiful part of the world we inhabit. Because no matter where we live, we are surrounded by animals that rise with the moon, and blooms that reveal themselves as light fades. Henion explores her home region of Appalachia, where she attends a synchronous firefly event in Tennessee, a bat outing in Alabama, and a moth festival in Ohio. In North Carolina, she finds forests alight with bioluminescent mushrooms, neighborhood trees full of screech owls, and valleys teeming with migratory salamanders. Along the way, Henion encounters naturalists, biologists, primitive-skills experts, and others who’ve dedicated their lives to cultivating relationships with darkness. In an age of increasing artificial light, Night Magic focuses on the amazing biodiversity that still surrounds us after sunset.

4. Bad Naturalist by Paula Whyman

When Paula Whyman first climbs a peak in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in search of a home in the country, she has no idea how quickly her tidy backyard ecology project will become a massive endeavor. Just as quickly, she discovers how little she knows about hands-on conservation work. In Bad Naturalist, readers meander with her through orchards and meadows, forests and frog ponds, as she is beset by an influx of invasive species, rattlesnake encounters, conflicting advice from experts, and delayed plans—but none of it dampens her irrepressible passion for protecting this place. With delightful, lyrically deft storytelling, she shares her attempts to coax this beautiful piece of land back into shape. It turns out that amid the seeming chaos of nature, the mountaintop is teeming with life and hope.

5. The Weird and Wonderful World of Bats by Alyson Brokaw

These woefully misunderstood creatures dwell in darkness, inspire fear, and threaten danger. They’ve been viewed as the pawns of evil deities and taken the undeserved blame for the spread of deadly viruses. The Weird and Wonderful World of Bats provides a fresh introduction to these curious flying mammals, explaining how they experience the world through unique senses, where and how they fly, the origins of their complex relationships with humans, and how we can learn from them—not only to coexist, but potentially grow healthier and wiser together.

2025’s Top Books at the Storefront

1. The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer

As Indigenous scientist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love. Meanwhile, the serviceberry’s relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude. The tree distributes its wealth—its abundance of sweet, juicy berries—to meet the needs of its natural community. And this distribution insures its own survival. As Kimmerer explains, “Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity, where wealth comes from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency.”

2. Portrait of the Rose City: A History of Madison New Jersey by Frank J. Esposito

Written by an acclaimed historian and committee of local experts, this book takes readers on an extraordinary journey into the heart of community, connection, resilience, and reinvention. It seamlessly weaves meticulous research and photos, with compelling storytelling to bring to life the exceptional community of Madison. Portrait of the Rose City offers a fascinating account into how a community can grow from humble beginnings to play an integral role in some of the most important moments in this country's history and to serve as a role model for small towns everywhere. Throughout its long history, Madison has navigated challenges that have tested communities nationwide: wars, civil unrest and social inequity, pandemics, industrial and technological revolutions. Unlike many towns that faltered under such pressures, Madison thrived, emerging stronger each time. The secret to Madison's success lies in its tradition of civic cooperation, mutual respect, and effective leadership, providing a model for other communities seeking sustainable growth and to not just survive, but to thrive. What is truly amazing about Madison is the belief of its residents that people working together can accomplish virtually anything. Welcome to Madison, New Jersey.

3. Tap the Magic Tree by Christie Matheson

Every book needs you to turn the pages. But not every book needs you to tap it, shake it, jiggle it, or blow it a kiss. Innovative and timeless, Tap the Magic Tree gives even the youngest reader the chance to help one lonely tree change with the seasons. Now that’s interactive—and magical!It begins with a bare brown tree. But tap that tree, turn the page, and one bright green leaf has sprouted. Tap again—one, two, three, four—and four more leaves have grown on the next page. Pat, clap, wiggle, jiggle, and blossoms bloom, apples grow, and the leaves swirl away with the autumn breeze. The collage-and-watercolor art evokes the bright simplicity of Lois Ehlert and Eric Carle, and the interactive concept will delight fans of Pat the Bunny. Combining a playful spirit and a sense of wonder about nature, Christie Matheson has created a new modern classic that is a winner in every season—and every story time!

4. 50 Hikes in New Jersey by Daniel Chazin

Known more for its urban areas than its green spaces, the Garden State is actually a crossroads for major interstate trails including the Maine-to-Georgia Appalachian Trail, the 150-mile Highlands Trail, and the 60-mile Delaware and Raritan Canal State Park Trail. Hike along the Appalachian ridge or over the ragged Wyanokies, pass into pine barrens or through marshes and dunes on the coast, and you’ll see that New Jersey has so much more to offer than just cities. These 50 routes cover walks, hikes, and backpacking trips from the Kittatinnies to Cape May.

5. Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings—asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass—offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

6. Songs of the Birds by Isabel Otter

There is a fascinating world of birds right outside our door! Delve into seven beautiful North American habitats and discover an amazing variety of birds, from the dark-eyed junco and northern cardinal to the red-tailed hawk and mountain bluebird. The book includes stunning paper-cut artwork and a sound button with 24 bird calls or songs to help readers identify birds in the wild.

7. The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan

In 2016, author Amy Tan grew overwhelmed by the state of the world: Hatred and misinformation became a daily presence on social media, and the country felt more divisive than ever. In search of peace, Tan turned toward the natural world just beyond her window and, specifically, the birds visiting her yard. But what began as an attempt to find solace turned into something far greater—an opportunity to savor quiet moments during a volatile time, connect to nature in a meaningful way, and imagine the intricate lives of the birds she admired. Tracking the natural beauty that surrounds us, The Backyard Bird Chronicles maps the passage of time through daily entries, thoughtful questions, and beautiful original sketches. With boundless charm and wit, Amy Tan charts her foray into birding and the natural wonders of the world.

8. Devotions by Mary Oliver

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver presents a personal selection of her best work in this definitive collection spanning more than five decades of her esteemed literary career. Throughout her celebrated career, Mary Oliver has touched countless readers with her brilliantly crafted verse, expounding on her love for the physical world and the powerful bonds between all living things. Carefully curated, these 200 plus poems feature Oliver’s work from her very first book of poetry, No Voyage and Other Poems, published in 1963 at the age of 28, through her most recent collection, Felicity, published in 2015. This timeless volume, arranged by Oliver herself, showcases the beloved poet at her edifying best. Within these pages, she provides us with an extraordinary and invaluable collection of her passionate, perceptive, and much-treasured observations of the natural world.

9. Because of an Acorn by Lola M. & Adam Schaefer

Because of an acorn, a tree grows, a bird nests, a seed becomes a flower. Enchanting die-cuts illustrate the vital connections between the layers of an ecosystem in this magical book. Wander down the forest path to learn how every tree, flower, plant, and animal connect to one another in spiraling circles of life. An acorn is just the beginning.

10. On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder

The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. On Tyranny is a call to arms and a guide to resistance, with invaluable ideas for how we can preserve our freedoms in the uncertain years to come.

Today we have a special edition of the newsletter, one written by my lovely husband!

It all started out as a joke…Mario saw me losing my mind for countless hours this year as I’d write and rewrite each newsletter. After many Sundays filled with this particular mania, he started to say, “Just let me write the next one! I’ll have it done in no time” (though he would soon learn that writing the newsletter is indeed as hard as it looks!).

Eventually, the joking turned into an earnest desire to write to you all and we decided the end of the year would be the perfect time to do it, especially because I’ve been sick for the past two weeks and only just returned to the shop for the first time yesterday. The closing of the year holds much space for reflection, and this year brought so many changes for us. So without further ado, I’ll turn things over to Mario.

Mario Looks Back

They say things tend to come in threes, and that definitely proved true this year. Before 2025 was halfway through, we had a new apartment, Hailey had a new shop, and I had a new job. “Chaotic” is too mild of a word to describe what our daily routine looked like until the middle of summer, but I am so grateful for all the positive changes these big transitions have brought to our lives.

When the year started, we already knew that the shop was going to be moving across the street into the space that the amazing clothing shop San Francisco had occupied for over forty years. Even though it felt like The Nature of Reading was still so new, I believe Bea saw that Hailey and the shop were ready to start their next adventure. Bea was one of the first people I met when we moved to Madison. I could see right away how kind and supportive she had been to Hailey for so many years, but I couldn’t have guessed what a big role she’d play in us starting the next chapter of our lives.

Everything with the shop was arranged at the end of 2024, so the first few months of 2025 were dedicated to Hailey measuring every single inch of Bea’s space to make plans. She even created a 3D model of what would be the new Nature of Reading!

While we were still unpacking everything from our January apartment move and trying to settle into our new home, Hailey spent countless hours designing the new shop and settling on every detail. It was a scary time when every conversation was filled with either our wildest hopes or our most terrifying fears. The first few months of the year were really a rollercoaster!

On March 22nd, we were so lucky to attend Bea’s farewell party and the ribbon cutting ceremony for her retirement.

Behind the scenes, this was an especially hard time for us—we had found out that we needed to say goodbye to Hailey’s childhood dog, Bogey, after 15 years of him being with the Brock family. The retirement party fell between when we learned this news and when the appointment was to take place, so the event became an incredibly emotional mix of all of the year’s changes hitting us at once. Basically, we cried the whole time.

For Hailey, saying goodbye to her family’s pet and saying goodbye to her friend Bea (even if she was taking over her shop’s space and would continue to see her often) was a hard mix to deal with. Still, seeing so many people being gathered to celebrate Bea and hearing all the different stories from people whose lives she touched through so many years of being in business is a memory that I will cherish forever. Through tears in my eyes, I saw Bea giving Hailey a big hug and a blessing in front of the whole community, and assuring her that her venture would be successful—I can’t express how grateful I am to her for her support.

After those hard days at the end of March, the countdown began…we had less than 4 weeks to get the space ready for April 26th, when Hailey wanted to do a soft opening since it was Independent Bookstore Day and only a few days after Earth Day, the day she first opened in 2022. Even though Bea had kept the space beautifully, we still needed to build and paint all the shelves, order new inventory, build all the furniture, paint the walls, and decorate the whole place. It may not sound like a lot, but Hailey did this with a very limited budget after some challenges with financing at the bank and just with the help of our incredible friends in family.

I think it’s safe to say that Hailey was working over 14 hours every day during April, but none of it could have been possible without Charlie—an angel on earth—Hailey’s Dad’s friend who built all the shelves and the checkout area for the shop and helped us move all the old shop’s furniture into the new space. As they worked hard to prepare the shop for the soft opening, I was in the middle of starting a new job in New York and learning the ropes at a whole new company and division.

Many things happened during the most intense weeks of the move, but I always return to certain moments: seeing Hailey put up a banner sign in the window of the new shop, signifying the start of what would be the new Nature of Reading; having our living room and second bedroom covered with boxes of books and new inventory items; seeing our family and friends painting shelves and building furniture and offering more help with smiles on their faces. I remember driving through Main Street and seeing the James Building after the Nature of Reading sign had been installed on the new storefront and thinking, Oh boy, it’s real now. It’s really happening.

Finally the shop opened its doors on April 26th! It was a limited opening, with me handling the sales in the new space while Hailey still had most of the inventory at the old shop, letting everyone know that the grand opening and ribbon cutting would take place on May 17th.

At the end of the day, we had our super fun book passing ceremony from the old shop to the new shop. We were able to gather so many amazing friends and customers to create a brigade line between the shops as we passed every single book across Main Street and through the doors of the new shop. It was lovely to get so many of our loyal customers to volunteer their time and help create a great memory for the new place and celebrate the start of a new chapter for The Nature of Reading!

Time continued to pass, and we spent the weeks in between the opening and the ribbon cutting ceremony finalizing details in the shop and getting all the inventory up on the shelves.

On the day of the grand opening, we were overjoyed to see how many people showed up to support the shop, the place was filled with energy! Seeing all the people walking around the new space, overhearing them saying how nice the shop smelled and how beautiful it all looked, it felt like everyone’s efforts were worth it, and that feeling has not gone away.

I am so grateful for living through those first months of the year and making so many memories that will stay with me forever. I am so grateful for all our friends and family who spent their weekends helping us in all the renovations and moving we went through.

Hailey, I couldn’t be more proud of you—when I walk into the shop I still cannot believe that it’s real.

It’s incredible to see what our community helped us build, and incredible to see how many people come in and love all the details of the shop.

Which brings us to you all, amazing readers! Every person that has supported us through a sale, a good review, attending a book club or an event, sharing the shop as a recommendation to a friend or family member, or so many other things—it really means so much. Without you, none of this is possible, and we thank you for allowing The Nature of Reading to be a part of your lives.

Thank you all so, so much. Have a wonderful end of the year, and we hope to see all of you very soon!

Mario

P.S. from Hailey

I couldn’t agree more with Mario—thank you all so very much for being here with us as we went through one of the biggest steps The Nature of Reading has taken yet. If you have any memories from The Nature of Reading this year, I’d love to read them in a reply to this email or in a comment below.

We’re closed tomorrow for New Year’s Day, but we’ll be open again on Friday from 11am to 5pm before returning to regular hours on the weekend.

Thank you so much, Happy New Year, and we’ll see each other soon!

Hello once again! We’re back with the December edition of our monthly events newsletter.

We’d love for you to join us for one of our last three crafting events of the year! If you’ve been thinking about attending one of our workshops, now is the perfect time—the store is in its peak cozy state, the crafts double as beautiful holiday decor, and you get a 10% discount on any purchases you’d like to make that night at the shop, making it a perfect time to get lots of holiday shopping done. I’d love to finish up the crafting year strong by seeing our tables filled with crafters! I so appreciate your continued support in making time in your busy schedules to come to our events and help build up our community here at the shop.

This is also your last week to ask about gift ideas for next week’s gift guides! Thank you to everyone who replied to my previous newsletter with questions for types of people they want gift ideas for—I’ve added them all to my list. Just reply to this email if you’d like to add your own kinds of gift recipients (we’ve got groups like gardeners, birders, book lovers, and many more!).

Alison is out today so I’m here at the shop until 4pm if you’d like to come say hello and get some book or gift recommendations in person! As always, we’re happy to custom order in any books for you, whether they’re nature-related or not. In order for your books to arrive by Christmas, we just request that you place your order by December 15th so the books have time to ship.

Also, you can now browse our gift items online! We’re slowly updating our online inventory to reflect all the marvelous gift items we have in store, so you can check this link as the week goes on to shop our full gift collection. If you’d like to purchase a book or gift and you live outside of NJ, never fear: we ship everywhere in the country!

Thank you all for being here with me in this busy time of year and for your continued support and kind words about our shop. I hope to see you sometime soon!

All best wishes,

Hailey

get your ticket here

First up in our December events is a joyful evening of embroidering one of these delightful wooden ornaments! Choose your favorite from 5 lovely designs. As always, this event is great for enthusiastic beginners—the kit contains everything you need, and I will be here to help guide you through the project and answer any questions you might have.

We’re very excited to bring back another holiday favorite—we’re doing our third annual holiday shopping giveaway with the most wonderful giftshop The Sunroom! If you shop at both of our stores Friday December 12th or Saturday December 13th, you’ll be entered to win a giveaway basket filled with goodies from our two shops. Follow us over on Instagram to stay updated about the giveaway!

get your ticket here

On Wednesday December 17th, we’ll get started with stitching this beautiful embroidery kit that includes all three mini hoops as pictured! No need to decide which you prefer—you get all three delightful mini projects which are the perfect size for transformation into ornaments.

get your ticket here

Join us for our last crafting event of the month for a sweet, festive evening of felting wool sugar cookies while snacking on real sugar cookies made by Madison’s own Dough & Behold! What could be better than an evening spent surrounded by books, chatting with lovely fellow crafters, and working on a soothing craft while eating the most delicious cookies?! We’d love to have you with us for this revival of last year’s beloved holiday crafting event, a wonderful way to close out your crafting year. (Please note: we’ve rearranged our cookie crafting event to better account for everyone’s schedules, so disregard our previous email!)

sign up here

There’s still plenty of time to join us for the next installment of The Nature of Reading Book Club! This month we’re reading this lovely little book, The Pleasures of Winter: Winter-Inspired Rituals for Rejuvenation, Serenity, and Joy by Erin Niimi Longhurst. Join us for a festive evening of discussing our favorite winter reads and rituals as well as our favorite environmental books from the whole year. 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.

It’s Small Business Saturday! What joy and merriment there is to be had!

If you stop by the shop today or tomorrow, you can shop dozens upon dozens of slightly damaged books in our biggest sale of the year. Get books for 25%, 30%, 40%, 50%, and even 75% off their original cover price.

Plus, any $10+ purchase you make this weekend will add you into a giveaway for a $150 Cozy Winter Reading Basket filled with a selection of wonderful nature books and gifts, including this month’s book club book! Online purchases for event tickets (and any other online purchases from local NJ customers) count as entries to the giveaway as well, so it’s a great time to get your ticket for any of our December crafting events, which we’ve announced below. And here’s a picture of the giveaway basket!

We hope to see you at the shop today or tomorrow—we’re open until 5pm today and we’ll be open for an extra hour tomorrow (Sunday 11/30) from 10am-4pm as part of Sunday Motor Co.’s holiday fundraiser event, A Very Special Sunday, which is raising money and collecting donations for Deirdre’s house. What could be better than great coffee, cozy books, and donations to a worthy cause?

Happy Small Business Saturday—thank you all again so much for your support. Even in these challenging times, you’ve helped our business and community grow and accomplish so much more than I could have ever hoped for. Thank you.

All best wishes,

Hailey

get your ticket here

First up in our December events is a joyful evening of embroidering one of these delightful wooden ornaments! Choose your favorite from 5 lovely designs. As always, this event is great for enthusiastic beginners—the kit contains everything you need, and I will be here to help guide you through the project and answer any questions you might have.

get your ticket here

Join us for a sweet, festive evening of felting wool sugar cookies while snacking on real sugar cookies made by Madison’s own Dough & Behold! What could be better than an evening spent surrounded by books, chatting with lovely fellow crafters, and working on a soothing craft while eating the most delicious cookies?! We’d love to have you with us for this revival of last year’s beloved holiday crafting event.

get your ticket here

On Wednesday December 17th, we’ll get started with stitching this beautiful embroidery kit that includes all three mini hoops as pictured! No need to decide which you prefer—you get all three delightful mini projects which are the perfect size for transformation into ornaments.

get your ticket here

Lastly, we tie up the holiday crafting season with a final collaborative event with Dough & Behold—but this time, instead of sugar cookies, we’ll be snacking on gingerbread cookies and felting little gingerbread people! We’d love to see you hear for the close of our holiday crafting events and another great evening for getting your holiday shopping done. As always, there is a 10% discount on any purchases made the night of an event.

sign up here

We’re back with the next installment of The Nature of Reading Book Club! This month we’re reading this lovely little book, The Pleasures of Winter: Winter-Inspired Rituals for Rejuvenation, Serenity, and Joy by Erin Niimi Longhurst. Join us for a festive evening of discussing our favorite winter reads and rituals as well as our favorite environmental books from the whole year. 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.