The Week’s Adventures
While we’re constructing our upcoming Summer issue (look for it on June 1!) we thought we’d compile our recent adventures as we posted on Instagram and Threads. Here in the Midwest, we’ve had glorious days of rain as you want this time of year. And the time inside gave us the opportunity to reach back to some of our favorite reading recommendations.
“If you only ever go out on sunny days you only see half the picture,” wrote Melissa Harrison in Rain: Four Walk in English Weather, Faber & Faber 2018, 128 pages. So true. We would have missed this delicate mixture of water, and green.
Longlisted for the Wainwright Prize, Finalist, National Geographic Traveller Reader Awards
“I visited four parts of the countryside in showery weather and, when others looked apprehensively at the sky and went indoors, I put on my waterproofs and headed out—in some cases, several times. I have blended these expeditions with reading, research, memory and a little conjecture. ... This book does not pretend to be an exhaustive survey of the country’s natural history during precipitation, and nor is it a purely scientific investigation into a meteorological phenomenon; instead, it’s an imaginative account of how England—human, animal, and vegetable—weathers, and is weathered by, the storm.” —Melissa Harrison
Rain: Four Walks in English Weather by Melissa Harrison, featured in our current Spring 2024 issue
Week before last, we visited the Poetry Foundation in Chicago….
A dream for lovers of poetry….
Open shelves to explore, pull something down, and find a quiet place to read…..
Last week, we visited Chicago’s Poetry Foundation and loved browsing through two stories of their collection. On the table, we saw a book we featured in our Spring issue—the LOVELY Poetree!
For young children and readers of all ages:
“Sylvia revels in the coming of spring and writes a celebratory poem to leave in a birch tree on her way to school. But when the tree appears to write back with a poem of its own, the excitement begins. Haiku, friendship, trees, and squirrels are celebrated in this charming book.” —Spring 2024 issue, Nature Book Guide
Poetree, Shauna LaVoy Reynolds (Author), Shahrzad Maydani (Illustrator), Dial Books, 2019, 32 pages. Reading Age: 4-8 years.
Poetree by Shauna LaVoy Reynolds, illustrated by Shahrzad Maydani, featured in the current issue of Nature Book Guide
All Among the Barley by Melissa Harrison, featured in the current issue of Nature Book Guide
One of our favorite works of fiction for spring is Melissa Harrison’s All Among the Barley, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019, 352 pages.
Teenager Edith June Mather lives on a farm on the cusp of change--the waning of folkways, the rise of mechanization and fascism, and shifting ideas about roles for women. Harrison writes lyrically about the beauty of nature and farm life and captures the harsh realities of the summer of 1933.
Widely recognized it was Book of the Year for the New Statesman, Observer, Irish Times, BBC History Magazine; Winner: European Union Prize for Literature
It is an astonishing novel with a slow satisfying pace to a shocking end.