The Nature of Reading Bookshop
Contact: Hailey Brock
Biographical Info
The Nature of Reading began as an online and pop-up bookshop on Earth Day, April 22, 2022. It is an environmental bookstore specializing in seasonal reading, nature writing, and climate change books, pulling together the joy and wonder of the natural world with the knowledge and passion to fight for its survival.
Seasonal reading is using books to better connect to the changing seasons, to embrace and feel them more deeply. It’s wonderful to connect your fiction reads to the seasons, to feel the fall air rush past you as you read the gothic Wuthering Heights, to watch spring flowers bloom with the romance in Pride and Prejudice. Perhaps you already read seasonally, with beach-based books in the summer and cozy mysteries in the winter. Seasonal reading is personal, it’s about finding what makes you appreciate the natural world the most, what makes you feel most connected and in-tune with the cycles that surround us.
Beyond fiction, there’s the whole beautiful realm of nature writing. Some books are based in certain seasons, while others provide a guidebook on how to view and appreciate the natural world. My favorites include Henry David Thoreau, Rachel Carson, and above all Mary Oliver. To see the world through the eyes of someone who appreciates every minute detail is one of the many gifts books bring us.
The other focus of the shop is climate change books: any nonfiction or fiction (sadly there is considerably less of this) that deals with the climate crisis. In particular, these curated books will seek to inform and empower us, to reveal the interconnectedness of other social issues with environmental ones, and to provide us with actions to take. The time to learn and take action about the climate crisis is now, and books can help lead the way.
As the natural world edges closer and closer into our daily lives, the nature of reading bookshop seeks to demonstrate the beauty and harmony between ourselves and nature (which is to say, amongst ourselves) and to spread awareness of the climate crisis, turning the lessons of literature into action.
This year we were able to secure a beautiful space at 22 Main Street in our hometown of Madison, NJ. It’s the perfect first space for us and little bookstore, and it’s just big enough to hold cozy book clubs and small events.
We hope that as our shop grows, The Nature of Reading will be a space for environmentalist groups to share their messages, local authors to do readings, book clubs to meet, and a place where you can always go to hear overly enthusiastic book recommendations. All of the coziness and community we’ve begun to build in the pop-up will be expanded into a full-grown space where the beauty and whimsy of the natural world will blend with the literary realm.