Port Book & News — August 2026

The past couple of clear days have felt like a respite to breathe. Between punishing waves of wildfires taking charge of the sky with menacing intent and parts of our bookstore family facing unfair challenges, it can be hard to keep perspective on things. It helps to remind yourself: look up once in a while.

Tonight, for example, the moon becomes new, an evocative way to say it all but disappears— and in the small hours after midnight, tonight and again tomorrow night, the Perseids come down through that extra-dark sky. No moonlight, no competition, and one of the darker skies in the Lower 48 sitting a forty-minute drive up Hurricane Ridge Road. This does not happen every year.

So this letter looks up. The third installment of our Field Guides to Field Guides is about weather, sky, and the air over this place — what to carry up the hill, what to read when you get home, and the one book that explains why our weather is the way it is.

After that: chamber music at the end of the month, a fall that is already filling up, and the usual pile of new books.

A Field Guide to Field Guides: Weather, Sky & Atmosphere

Field Guide to Sky Field Guides

One guide for the pack, one for the shelf — except up here the pack guide has to work in the dark without a screen wrecking your night vision.

To take up the hill: Night Sky (Kavanagh) — a folding laminated card, moon and planets and seasonal constellations, survives wet grass. And Constellation Finder (Miller), which teaches the patterns instead of just naming them.

By the chair: NightWatch (Dickinson), spiral-bound so it lies flat, the one for people who have decided this is a habit. And The Stars: A New Way to See Them — H. A. Rey, of Curious George — which redraws the constellations so they look like their names. Works on adults; works better on eight-year-olds.

For clouds: The Cloudspotter's Guide (Pretor-Pinney), the most-loved book in the category, and less a manual than an argument that looking up is free.

If you only buy one: The Weather of the Pacific Northwest, Cliff Mass. Why the rain shadow exists, why Sequim stays dry, where the summer smoke comes from. No book exists about the Olympic rain shadow — this is the chapter that stands in for one.

Music on the Strait, August 22–30

The festival James Garlick and Richard O'Neill started here in 2018 opens Saturday the 22nd at 7:00 at Field Hall with a world premiere — Gabriela Lena Frank's El Mundo — alongside Respighi and Dohnányi, and closes Sunday the 30th at 3:00, also at Field Hall, with pianist Jeremy Denk and the Takács Quartet playing Mendelssohn, Beethoven's Tempest sonata, and the Franck quintet.

Two of the performers are also writers, and we will have them on the shelf — Denk's Every Good Boy Does Fine and Edward Dusinberre's Distant Melodies, on music written far from home — signed while they are in town. Ask us to hold one. musiconthestrait.org

Save the Date

Sept 10, 5:30 — Lands and Letters: In Trees, Robert Moor. NOLT office. A reply helps.

Sept 17, 6:00 — Robert Moor with Lynda Mapes. Dungeness River Nature Center.

Oct 7, 6:00 — Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Among the Birds. River Center, with Olympic Peninsula Audubon. Preorder now.

Oct 9–11 — Dungeness Crab & Seafood Festival. City Pier. Free.

Oct 17–18 — Olympic Peninsula Fungi Festival. Waterfront & The HUB.

Oct 24 — Port Angeles Book Fair. Field Hall. Free.

Details for all of it at portbooknews.com.

Staff Pick

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

How is it that an 850-page Western, which is not exactly high on the list of popular genres these days, is having something of a moment? I can't speak for the other reviewers opining on the Internet, but I picked this up because Crystal told me it might just be her favorite novel. Best decision I've made this summer.

Lonesome Dove is about two retired Texas Rangers driving cattle from the Rio Grande to Montana in the 1870s, and perhaps the strongest argument in American fiction that a friendship can be the entire subject of a novel. Gus and Call have been talking past each other for thirty years by the time the book opens, and McMurtry lets them keep doing it for the length of a continent.

This is one of those books that you finish and immediately miss the time you had with those characters. A new screen adaptation is reportedly in development. I'll just note a mysterious phenomenon: I'd never watched the celebrated TV Miniseries yet Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall's voices were already in my head when I read the book. You've been warned.

—Steven

A Port Angeles photographer, back home in the gallery

The Field Arts & Events Hall opens Everyone Deserves to Be Seen on Friday, August 21, with a reception that evening — a black-and-white show by Steve Raber, a Port Angeles High grad who went on to shoot the late-night club scene in mid-eighties Los Angeles. He'd spend half an hour with a stranger and come away with a portrait that treated them with real dignity. Raber has since passed, and the exhibit is the first chance many of us will have to see the work together.

The artist coordinating the show, Joyce Nadig, has printed Shaping of a Photographer, a self-published book that traces how he found his eye. We'll have copies for the run of the exhibit. Come by and page through one.

New in August

Etna by Paul Yoon

The month's number-one Indie Next pick is two hundred pages about a war dog making its way home. The best kind of short novel: compact, strange, and not a word wasted.

Sunrise by Téa Obreht

A woman miraculously survives falling from an airplane into a remote Wyoming lake, only to trek into a town where every resident has vanished. From that eerie opening, Obreht spends the next century unraveling the mystery.

Adversary to the Villain by Hannah Nicole Maehrer (Aug 4)

Evie Sage never applied to be the kingdom's ultimate threat, but with prophecy pointing her way and magic choosing her side, her "villain era" is officially underway. Maehrer delivers another deliciously chaotic, slow-burn entry in the series.

Daggerbound by T. Kingfisher (Aug 25)

A Hugo winner writing in the romantasy lane, and funnier and stranger than that shelf usually promises. Not for everyone; exactly right for the reader it is for. We ordered more copies of this than anything else on this list, which should tell you something.

God's Country by William Kent Krueger (Aug 18)

Cork O'Connor series book twenty-two, set in the Boundary Waters. Krueger is one of the few crime writers who makes weather and water do real work in a plot, which makes him the right mystery for an issue about the sky.

Alive by Melanie Challenger (Aug 11)

Challenger, who wrote How to Be Animal, giving us a new work on what counts as "mind" in the rest of the living world. The nature book of the month for the reader who wants an argument rather than a field guide. In paperback and on the shelf now.

Heart of Glass by Jennifer Hillier (Aug 25)

A Pacific Northwest thriller from a Pacific Northwest writer, which is most of why we are pointing at it. If you have handed someone Jar of Hearts and watched them come back for the next one, this is the next one.

Famous Last Words

There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

— Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Written by a man who spent a lot of nights outside paying attention.

Take it literally tonight: set an alarm for three in the morning, drive up the hill, and let the sun be a star for a while.

One more night worth setting an alarm for: Thursday the 27th, when the moon rises already about 93% eclipsed by the earth's shadow, deepest near 9:15, low in the east-southeast. You want an open view that direction — the Strait obliges. No equipment, no drive up the hill, no good reason not to look up.