August was a busy month. It usually is. The number of summer visitors may be starting to ebb and the cash register may be a little quieter, but there are other sounds perking up: School bells and the sounds of a #2 Ticonderoga being sharpened. Earlybird bigleaf maple leaves blowing across Hurricane Ridge Road. The pitter patter of an occasional rain (please let there be more). Boxes of 2027 calendars being delivered to Port Book and News. The worm has turned, and Autumn is knocking on the door.

One day, on a whim, Robert Moor set out to climb a tree near his home. A decade later he had scaled a giant sequoia with Sir David Attenborough, slept one very uncomfortable night in a chimpanzee nest in Tanzania, and fallen in with a ragtag clan of climate activists risking everything to save an old-growth forest from a pipeline.

In Trees is the book he came back with — a witty, relentlessly curious excursion through philosophy, history, and science in pursuit of what Moor calls “tree-thinking,” as much about what trees do to us as what we do with them. Excerpted in The New Yorker and National Geographic, it has been called “brilliant” by Robert Macfarlane. In Trees is also the September selection for Lands & Letters, our naturalist book club with the North Olympic Land Trust.

The club meets Thursday, September 10 at 5:30 at the Land Trust office — mention the club at the counter for 20% off, or pay full price and we'll pass the difference to NOLT. The room seats about twenty and it filled in May; a quick reply helps us plan chairs and cookies.

Then, Thursday, September 17 at 5:30 p.m., Moor himself joins Lynda Mapes — Seattle Times environment reporter, author of Witness Tree and The Trees Are Speaking, and a great friend of this store — in the Rainshadow Room at the Dungeness River Nature Center in Sequim. Free and open to everyone; the room is not infinite, so RSVP here. Q&A and signing to follow. (Own a copy of On Trails? Bring it. He'll sign that too.)

Two picks this month arrived by way of the multiplex — one adaptation we're wary of, one takedown we cheered.

Wednesday, October 7, 6:00 — Lyanda Lynn Haupt on Among the Birds, at the Dungeness River Nature Center with Olympic Peninsula Audubon. The book is out (see above); the author follows in five weeks.

October 9–11 — the Dungeness Crab & Seafood Festival takes the City Pier. Free, three days, and about twelve thousand of your neighbors.

October 17–18 — the Olympic Peninsula Fungi Festival, waterfront and The HUB. (Mushroom people: next month's field guide feature is for you. That's all we'll say for now.)

Saturday, October 24 — the Port Angeles Book Fest at Field Hall. Free to walk in, local authors all afternoon.

Briefly: Ariel Lawhon's The Pirate Queen (the Frozen River author takes on Grace O'Malley, Sept 8); Madeline Miller's Mestra (an 80-page story, her first since Circe — $15, stocking-sized, Sept 29); Marlon James' 640-page The Disappearers; Jodi Picoult's Hollow Bones (Sept 15); Hernan Diaz's Ply (Sept 29); and Kate Atkinson's Our Noble Selves (Sept 15), a postwar-London thriller from one of fall's most anticipated lists.

Clear your Tuesdays. The mysteries are arriving one a week, all month:

Order any of them now and they'll be waiting on pub day.

Also arriving: Leigh Bardugo's Dead Beat (Sept 15), the Alex Stern finale; Brandon Sanderson & Janci Patterson's Blightfall, opening a new Skyward-universe trilogy; China Miéville's The Rouse (Sept 15) — his first novel in a decade, 1,260 pages, we'll happily order you one; Victoria Aveyard's Tempest (Sept 8); and Rachel Gillig's The Knave and the Moon.

The Bookshop Woman — Nanako Hanada (this September). A Tokyo bookseller starts matching strangers with exactly the right book. We are contractually and constitutionally obligated to carry this.

Briefly: Gloria Steinem's memoir An Unexpected Life (Sept 22 — Steinem at 92); Ben Macintyre's Redwood (Sept 15), the Cold War's most extraordinary spy, exfiltrated from revolutionary Iran; Jared Diamond asking when leaders actually matter in Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings; Isabel Allende on the writing life in Story Telling (Sept 15); Kai Bird's Roy Cohn biography American Scoundrel; and Ke Huy Quan's Never Say Die.

Also this month: Charles Hood's pocket natural history Acorns joins the trees display; Todd Warger's The Mountain Runners (WSU Press, this September) recovers America's first adventure race, run up Mount Baker in 1911. And next month: forester Ethan Tapper's The Forest Year — we're taking preorders.

New section, long overdue: the books you waited a year for, now at the friendlier price.

(Also: the Sunrise on the Reaping movie tie-in paperback — the film hits theaters November 20.)

Copper Canyon Press, sixty miles from here in Port Townsend, is publishing six books in six September weeks — the kind of fall run most presses in Manhattan would envy. In the run: Sherwin Bitsui's The Next Sky, Ellie Black's debut Revelator, James Richardson's Within the Hour, Pádraig Ó Tuama's Love Between Men (Sept 22, from the host of Poetry Unbound), and Tishani Doshi's Egrets, While War. The one we'll press on you first:

And from Wave Books in Seattle:

Birds in June, the coast in July, the sky in August — and now the thing all three live in.

Same idea as always: one guide for the pack, one for the shelf. For the pack, it's been settled on this Peninsula for thirty years: Mac's Field Guide to Northwest Trees (Craig MacGowan), a $5.95 laminated card that has walked out of this store more than three hundred times. Alongside it, Pacific Coast Tree Finder (Tom Watts) — a pocket key that teaches you to ask the right questions of a branch.

For the shelf: Northwest Trees (Stephen Arno, illustrated by Ramona Hammerly) is the regional standard, the one that tells you how each species actually lives. For the chair by the window: Suzanne Simard's Finding the Mother Tree, and her brand-new When the Forest Breathes, which is moving fast here already.

And for the reader who won't key out a single conifer: John Vaillant's The Golden Spruce — over 1,600 copies sold at this counter, and still the book we reach for.

If you only buy one this month: In Trees. The author will be in the room on the 17th.

The full guide — every tier, every title — is on our website and in the handout at the register.

Still collecting: a book you found here, a person who found it for you, an afternoon in the stacks. We turn forty this year and we're reading every memory that comes in. portbooknews.com/40, or a card at the counter.

Slowly the canoe drifted away from the moonlit landing, till, at the end of her rope, she lay an empty thing, floating among the shadows of an inverted forest.

— Emily Carr, Klee Wyck (1941; Douglas & McIntyre restored edition)

Carr wrote her endings the way she painted — no explaining.