This book is a joy to hold and behold. Just what the Universe has ordered up for these trying times, and Margaret Renkl has delivered. 52 transcendent meditations on the natural world. Brief yet beautiful with illustrations to accompany done by her brother.

Over and over Margaret reminds us that even though "The world is burning, and there is no time to put down the water buckets, for just an hour, put down the water buckets anyway."

I promise you, you will not even need an hour, just a few minutes a day to realize that "The world is trembling into possibility" and that "until the very last cricket falls silent, the beauty-besotted will find a reason to love the world."

-Alan

Like Richard Powers' *The Overstory*, this work has a larger frame of reference than any single human generation, and there is a non-trivial share of attention paid to trees. Like 2022's *When I Sing, Mountains Dance*, the organizing principle here is a place and the perspectives aren't always human. Mason crafts something that dances across genres and formats. It works on many levels, I felt like I could read it again as soon as I finished and detected all sorts of new resonances.

There is love, illicit and otherwise, all manner of contemplations of nature (including a particularly memorable recollection of elm bark beetle congress), ghosts and grisly crimes, the cultivation and re-wilding of lands, and people falling in and out of love with living just beyond the edges of civilization. Intricate and spellbinding.

-Steven

Dave Eggers hit it so far out of the park with The Eyes and the Impossible that when we heard the news the book had won the 2024 Newberry Medal for the most outstanding contribution to children's literature, all we could say was: well of course it did.

How did Eggers craft a touching, clever and perfectly-paced book about bravery and belonging and friendship and finding one's purpose? Where the narrator, Johannes the dog, is tasked with being the "eyes" of the animal stewards of the park (three ancient bison) while collaborating with a ragtag interspecies squad (a seagull, a raccoon, pelican, a squirrel)? "I interviewed a number of dogs," he said recently.

You could take out for a walk each volume on the hallowed shelf of Great Works Narrated By Canines (which includes entries from Mark Twain, Anton Chekhov, Paul Auster, Mikhail Bulgakov, Franz Kafka and Garth Stein, to name some of the most luminous luminaries), and I never have more fun than this wild and carefree joyride.

This is truly the literary equivalent of a dog running happily through a park.

-Steven