Winter Solstice is Upon Us

Today is the first day of winter and the darkest day of the year. One of our oldest observed celebrations, the winter solstice has been recognized by souls for tens of thousands of years. Enjoy your day, observe the sky, and pray for the return of the sun.

Acoustic sounds for the holidays

Thanks to all you dedicated book enthusiasts who made the trek through yesterday’s ice and freezing rain to our cozy store, we were delighted to see you all!
We have a fantastic selection of holiday music from your favorite artists. Some of my favorite seasonal albums have a very organic, acoustic sound, distinct from the jingles commonly heard in shopping centers at this time of year. My particular favorite is “American Noel”, a blend of artful folk originals and traditional carols lovingly performed by the late, great Dave Carter and the inimitable Tracy Grammer. With a slightly more produced sound, “Simple Gifts: A Small Town Christmas” featuring Billy McLaughlin, offers a warm and intimate approach to familiar Christmas songs. And in “A Midwinter Night’s Dream”, Loreena McKennett brings elaborately beautiful Celtic-inspired instrumentation and her distinctively clear voice to old time carols like “The Holly and Ivy”. Visit our listening station and find the perfect soundtrack to your special holiday traditions!

A Poem for You Today

We have this beautiful poetry collection on our shelf. Maybe you have heard of it? It is called Long Journey: Contemporary Northwest Poets and it is edited by David Biespiel.

I finally opened it today, after weeks of temptation, and this is what I found.


OLD AGE

It surprises me each time
I see a horse lie down in a field

a protest

in the bend and fold:
the way a body relinquishes its hold
as it sinks, unguarded,
to the earth.

by Eve Joseph


SHADOW

To lie on one side of a tree
then another, over rough or smooth.

To feel cool along one's whole body
lengthening without intent,
nothing getting in the way.

To give up on meaning,
To never wear out or mar.

To move by increments like
a beautiful equation, like the moon
ripening above the golden city.

To be doppelganger,
the feathered underside of wings,
the part of cumulus that slides
thin promises of rain across the wheat.

To disappear. To be blue
simply because snow has fallen
and it's the blue hour of the day.

by Lorna Crozier

Thanksgiving and Giving Thanks

I like Thanksgiving. Not because it’s a chance to overeat or reexamine history, but because it’s a holiday we can distill, in ways we each choose, to a celebration of thankfulness itself. When I began putting together a Thanksgiving display for our front table, I wanted to make sure it represented more than just cookbooks, so I had to do a little sleuthing in sections ranging from poetry to nature writing to spirituality. A few books I came across took me by special surprise. Here are some I'm especially excited about.

Earth Prayers From Around the World: 365 Prayers, Poems, and Invocations for Honoring the Earth, edited by Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon
This wonderful little anthology is collected into eleven parts including The Ecological Self; Blessings and Invocations; Praise and Thanksgiving; Benediction for the Animals; Cycles of Life; and The Daily Round. Inclusions range from Walt Whitman, Wendell Berry, Dylan Thomas and Thich Nhat Hanh, as well as pieces from the Chinook, Aivilik Eskimos, Navajo, Teton Sioux, Zuni, Masai, and more.

Holy Ground: A Gathering of Voices Caring for Creation edited by Lyndsay Moseley and the staff of Sierra Club Books. Every time I see this little book I am fascinated. This collection of nearly three dozen essays examines earth stewardship from the perspectives of the world's faith religions. Includes "Grace" by Gary Snyder, "Heaven and Earth Meet" by Pope Benedict XVI; and "The Shalom Principle" by Peter Sawtell. Other familiar names include Terry Tempest Williams, Wendell Berry and Janisse Ray.

Stonewall Kitchen Winter Celebrations: Special Recipes for Family and Friends by Jonathan King, Jim Stott, and Kathy Gunst
Preparing food is a holy act. Possibly made holier with recipes like "butternut squash soup with curried pecans, apple, and goat cheese" or "thin green beans with brown butter and roasted chestnuts." Wow. Poetry in the titles alone... I wouldn't recommend entirely displacing such simple acts of divinity as cornbread, but I wouldn't pass over some indulgence, either.

A Poem for You Today

Wendell Berry published a new collection of poetry, Leavings, on November 1st. We've nearly sold out! Why? Because it is so, so, so, so good.

Here's a quick preview.



LIKE SNOW
Suppose we did our work
like the snow, quietly, quietly,
leaving nothing out.




SABBATH XI.
My young grandson rides with me
as I mow the day's first swath
of the hillside pasture,
and then he rambles the woods beyond
the field's edge, emerging
from the trees to wave, and I wave back,

remembering that I too once
played at a field's edge and waved
to an old workman who went mowing by,
waving back to me as he passed.

New Shadow Magnets!

We have a new line of magnets in our store! Full of personality, these characters are $9.95 each, but are 10% this month for everybody who has a Grass Roots Icard (stamp card).Click here to see all 12 Shadow Magnet characters!

Books You Might Otherwise Not See

Don't neglect these books! Just because they aren't displayed in our front window doesn't mean they don't deserve some careful love and attention. You'll find all three of them, in fact, shelved in our "Staff Favorites" section.

Evidence of Evolution
by Susan Middleton and Mary Ellen Hannibal
As much an art book as a science book, the photographs in this book will keep you mesmerized. I want a copy for my coffee table, nightstand, backpack, bookshelf, car, bicycle basket, and breakfast table. The four major sections cover Darwin and Galapagos; Processes of Evolution; Patterns of Evolution; and The Unending Synthesis, all fantastically illustrated in photographs. Exquisite!

Strange Maps: An Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities
by Frank Jacobs
The contents of this book are bizarre and wide-ranging and include inverted maps; upside-down maps; maps of jelly; the United States as 38 states; the United States as 16 New American Nations; Thomas Jefferson's conception of the 10 states that never were; and Italy on the Atlantic.

Censored 2010: The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2008-09
Edited by Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff with Project Censored
I took this book to lunch with me and was more than a little shocked. The further I delved, the more intrigued I became.

"Required reading for broadcasters, journalists, and well-informed citizens." -Los Angeles Times

"Buy it, read it, act on it. Our future depends on the knowledge this collection of suppressed stories allows us." -San Diego Review

~April

Fleshing Out Philosophy

The NEW Great Ideas Series from Penguin. These slender little volumes are $10 each and are just slim enough to slide into a back pocket. Check out the Great Ideas website to see the other three series available... Let us know if you see one you want that isn't on our list -- we can order it for you!

We have each of the editions listed below.

Plutarch - In Consolation to his Wife
Robert Burton - Some Anatomies of Melancholy
Blaise Pascal - Human Happiness
Adam Smith - The Invisible Hand
Edmund Burke - The Evils of Revolution
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Nature
Søren Kierkegaard - The Sickness Unto Death
Leo Tolstoy - A Confession
William Morris - Useful Work versus Useless Toil
Frederick Jackson Turner - The Significance of the Frontier in American History
Marcel Proust - Days of Reading
Leon Trotsky - An Appeal to the Toiling, Oppressed and Exhausted Peoples of Europe

Several weeks ago two local poets came to read in Grass Roots. I hadn’t had the chance to sit down and enjoy a reading in months. As I listened to their voices fill the room, I relaxed into a state of easy bliss. As the evening passed I found that I was deriving as much joy from simply being read to as I was from the actual poetry itself. Perhaps this contentment comes from the many hours I spent in rapt audience to my parents’ ritual nightly read-alouds, I’m not sure. But I do know that listening to human voices breathe life into written words is one of the most comforting pastimes.

I do a lot of reading aloud (since I'm always coming across passages I want to share), but I don’t as often get a chance to listen in. Lately I’ve been daydreaming about some of the books I’d like to have read to me, particularly by the authors themselves. Here are a few…


The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William KamKwamba – because I'm reading it right now and I love it and I love KamKwamba's voice. It is so evident that Kamkwamba comes from a tradition of oral storytelling – he is magnificent as he describes his parents and childhood. I’m only a quarter of the way in, but I’m spellbound.



The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen – for the obvious reasons if you open the back flap and see the author's fine blue eyes. Well, and the fact that this was one of the most intriguing and fun books I read this year. All variety of unusual maps and diagrams fill the margins of the pages – if somebody reads this book to you, you'll need to peek over their shoulder, for sure.


The Memory of Old Jack by Wendell Berry – because Berry's fiction is some of my favorite and last week a trusted customer told me that this is Berry's best. I've never heard Wendell Berry's voice, but I suspect it adds even more depth to his stories.





And my Two Favorite Poets: Mary Oliver (from her Poetry Handbook) and Maurice Manning (from his Bucolics) -- because I’ve heard recordings of Mary Oliver and I love her reading voice, and because I’ve heard Maurice Manning read in person before and it was sublime. Transcendent? Sure.




What book would you like read aloud to you by its author?
Take our poll at right.
~April

Alexandra Day and Carl Charm Corvallis

What a whirlwind visit we had from Alexandra Day and her star dog Carl! For days prior to her visit we were swamped with phone calls from eager fans... "do you have any Carl books? Will the dog really be visiting with Alexandra? Will Alexandra Day sign more than one book per person?"

The answers to all questions were Yes, Yes, Yes!!!

Video clips of Carl and his magnificent tricks -- coming soon!
~April