Our monthly book club is held (about) once a month here at Chicory Naturalist (25 Broadway, Kingston NY) from 6pm-8pm. We have snacks, bevs, and great conversation!

No purchase is necessary to participate (we love libraries!), but if you'd like to support our work while participating in book club, the links for each title are below.

BOOK CLUB CALENDAR 2025:


February 27th, 6~8pm -- 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? 

March 27th, 6~8pm -- How to Love a Forest by Ethan Tapper
A tender, fearless debut by a forester writing in the tradition of Suzanne Simard, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Robert Macfarlane....Only those who love trees should cut them, writes forester Ethan Tapper. In How to Love a Forest, he asks what it means to live in a time in which ecosystems are in retreat and extinctions rattle the bones of the earth. 
order for pickup -- email chris@chicorynaturalist.com

April 24th, 6~8pm  -- The Body is a Doorway by Sophie Strand (out March 4th)
In this lyrical, radically expansive self-portrait, celebrated poet, author, and lecturer Sophie Strand explores--with searing insight and honesty--the intersecting spaces of her own chronic illness, the complex ecology of a changing world, and the very nature of the stories we tell ourselves.
pre-order for pickup -- email chris@chicorynaturalist.com

May 22nd, 6~8pm  -- When No Thing Works by Rōshi Norma Wong
Talking story, weaving poetry, and offering wisdom at the intersections of strategy, politics, and spiritual activism, When No Thing Works is a visionary guide to co-creating new worlds from one in crisis. It asks into the ways we can live well and maintain our wholeness in an era of collective acceleration the swiftly moving current, fed and shaped by human actions, that sweeps us toward ever uncertain futures.
order for pickup -- email chris@chicorynaturalist.com

June 26th, 6~8pm  -- Forest Euphoria by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian (out May 27th)
A thrilling book about the abounding queerness of the natural world that challenges our expectations of what is normal, beautiful, and possible...Wide-ranging, richly observant, and full of surprise, Forest Euphoria will open your eyes and change how you look at the world around you.
pre-order for pickup -- email chris@chicorynaturalist.com

July 24th, 6~8pm  -- Night Magic by Leigh Ann Henion
In this glorious celebration of the night, New York Times bestselling 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
order for pickup -- email chris@chicorynaturalist.com
August 28th, 6~8pm  -- Immemorial by Lauren Markham
"I am in need of a word," writes Lauren Markham in an email to the Bureau of Linguistical Reality, an organization that coins neologisms. She describes her desire to memorialize something that is in the process of being lost--a landscape, a species, birdsong. How do we mourn the abstracted casualties of what's to come?

In a dazzling synthesis of reporting, memoir, and essay, Markham reflects on the design and function of memorials, from the traditional to the speculative--the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, a converted prison in Ljubljana, a "ghost forest" of dead cedar trees in a Manhattan park--in an attempt to reckon with the grief of climate catastrophe. Can memorials look toward the future as they do to the past? How can we create "a psychic space for feeling" while spurring action and agitating for change?
order for pickup -- email chris@chicorynaturalist.com
September 25th, 6~8pm  -- Human Nature by Kate Marvel

Human Nature is a deeply felt inquiry into our rapidly changing Earth. In each chapter, Marvel uses a different emotion to explore the science and stories behind climate change. As expected, there is anger, fear, and grief—but also wonder, hope, and love. With her singular voice, Marvel takes us on a soaring journey, one filled with mythology, physics, witchcraft, bad movies, volcanoes, Roman emperors, sequoia groves, and the many small miracles of nature we usually take for granted. Hopeful, heartbreaking, and surprisingly funny, Human Nature is a vital, wondrous exploration of how it feels to live in a changing world.

order for pickup -- email chris@chicorynaturalist.com
October 23rd, 6~8pm  -- Orbital by Samantha Harvey

A slender novel of epic power and the winner of the Booker Prize 2024, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men traveling through space. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts--from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan--have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate. Profound and contemplative, Orbital is a moving elegy to our environment and planet.

order for pickup -- email chris@chicorynaturalist.com
November 6th, 6~8pm  -- Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay
**TENTATIVE** -- Poetry/potluck evening to wrap our year of reading & sharing. Read the book or just the titular poem, bring a favorite poem & a dish to share, decompress together before the holidays sweep us away. 

Winner, 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award Winner, 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, 2015 NAACP Image Awards Finalist, 2015 National Book Award

Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude is a sustained meditation on that which goes away--loved ones, the seasons, the earth as we know it--that tries to find solace in the processes of the garden and the orchard. That is, this is a book that studies the wisdom of the garden and orchard, those places where all--death, sorrow, loss--is converted into what might, with patience, nourish us.

order for pickup -- email chris@chicorynaturalist.com
January 22nd, 2026 6~8pm  -- Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless:
What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival by Maria Pinto

Naturalist, forager, and educator Maria Pinto offers a stunning debut book that uncovers strange and beautiful fungal connections between the natural and human worlds. She mingles reportage, research, memoir, and nature writing, touching on topics that range from Black farmers' domestication of the unforgettable aroma of truffles to the possibility that enslaved people wielded mycological poisons against their enslavers. Pinto brings a new perspective and a distinctive literary voice to this mix of environmental and lived history, and every page sings with her enthusiasm for the networks in which we are embedded: fungal, ecological, ancestral, and communal. Join her in pursuit of beautiful, perplexing, delicious, and deadly mushrooms as she explores this understudied kingdom's awe-inspiring diversity and discovers how fungi have been used by people, especially those on the margins, for survival, pleasure, revelation, and revolution.

PRE-ORDER for pickup (out in Oct) -- email chris@chicorynaturalist.com