October
Port Book & News · No. 10
Port Book and News sign
Port Book and
Newsletter
Just named "Best place to buy a book" for the 27th year
104 E. First Street, Port Angeles, WA 98362
October 2026•Volume 1, Number 10

After Dark

One day last week, two customers said the same thing: the dark came early. And so it does. By October the lights are on before dinner, the rain is at last back, and the question becomes what to do with all these evenings.

Quite a lot. Lyanda Lynn Haupt joins us next Wednesday at the Dungeness River Nature Center; Crab Fest and then the Fungi Festival take the waterfront; on the 24th, forty tables of Northwest writers fill Field Hall for the Port Angeles Book Fest, and the Fall Crawl runs downtown after dark. Two nights later we'll be here very late indeed for the midnight release of the sixth A Court of Thorns and Roses book. And on Halloween, as always, we're giving away books instead of candy.

The shelves have adjusted to the hour too: skeletons, bats, and some of the biggest novels of the fall. If the rain keeps up, the chanterelles will have their say. The dark came early. We brought books.

New in October

Partita — Barbara Kingsolver (Oct 6). Her first novel since Demon Copperhead. An old lover's phone call returns a farm-country wife to the conservatory pianist she once was. Ask for the independent-bookstore edition.

Peck & Peck — Bonnie Garmus (Oct 13). After Lessons in Chemistry: 1980s New York, and a young man hired by the world's most prestigious, most dysfunctional poetry journal.

Music Against the Night — Yiyun Li (Oct 13). The Dublin prodigy who invented the nocturne, and the orphan from French India he is fated to marry. First of a trilogy.

Miss Wolcott's Ghost — Louise Penny (Oct 20). A phone call in the night, a century-old body on a nameless grave, and the twenty-first Gamache. Order now; it's yours on pub day.

For Halloween: Stephen King finishes the Talisman trilogy he began with the late Peter Straub, Other Worlds Than These (Oct 6).

Wendell Berry, 1934–2026. Wendell Berry died on August 31, at home in Port Royal, Kentucky. He was 92. One more book is coming: Dispatches from Rural America (Counterpoint, October 27, $27), a new collection of essays on farming and the places industrial agriculture left behind, arriving close to fifty years after The Unsettling of America. His last Port William novel, Marce Catlett, is out in paperback this month.

Midnight Release for a the newest Sara J Maas

The Port Angeles Book Fest, October 24

QR Code
RSVP

Saturday, October 24, 1–4 p.m. · Field Arts & Events Hall · free

About forty tables of Northwest authors, small presses and booksellers on both floors of Field Hall, with the people who wrote the books sitting right there. Poet laureate Nellie Bridge opens the day. Gregg Olsen talks true crime; his new Ordinary Wife is on our table three days early. Alice Derry hosts eight Peninsula writers, and Clay Vermulm leads a panel on getting published. Find us just inside the door. An RSVP helps: bit.ly/4rla3RA.

October at a Glance

Oct 4–10 · Banned Books Week

Wed, Oct 7, 6:00 · Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Dungeness River Nature Center

Oct 9–11 · Dungeness Crab Festival · City Pier

Sat, Oct 10 · Last day for used-book trade-ins

Oct 16–18 · Olympic Peninsula Fungi Festival

Sat, Oct 24, 1–4 · Port Angeles Book Fest · Field Hall · free

Sat, Oct 24, 5–8 · Fall Crawl · downtown

Mon, Oct 26, midnight · Midnight Maas release · the store

Sat, Oct 31 · Halloween book giveaway · the store

Staff Picks

Cover of PlantYou Quickies

PlantYou Quickies by Carleigh Bodrug

I happen to own both of Bodrug's previous cookbooks and they are both winners with my family, with no dud recipes. Bodrug's books have a very approachable layout, with clear instructions, explanations, and pictures of each dish and all the ingredients, perfect for those of us who eat with our eyes as well as our mouths. Quickies is quickly becoming our new favorite. Who has time to cook during the busy week? Not us, and this book has truly quick, minimal effort dinners. We cooked three recipes so far, each of them delicious and easy. Do yourself a favor and make "One-Skillet Tuscan Beans" - a true one-pan dump-and-cook.

—Helena

Cover of Plants of the Pacific Coast

Plants of the Pacific Coast by Jim Pojar

Nobody around here says the old title. They say “Pojar and MacKinnon,” and they mean the plant guide that has lived in daypacks on this Peninsula since 1994. This is its first full rework in thirty years. It has a new name, a longer reach (Alaska to Oregon now) and two new co-authors: taxonomist Jamie Fenneman and Squamish ethnobotanist Leigh Joseph (Styawat), who rewrote the way the guide talks about people and plants. More than 700 species, 1,300 photographs, and 740 range maps. The cultural notes are in the present tense now, and the authors say why: this knowledge is not a thing of the past. The old one earned its half-million copies by working in the field. This one still does, and it has more to say about the ground you're standing on.

—Steven

New in Paperback

The books you waited a year for, at the friendlier price. Shadow Ticket — Thomas Pynchon ($20, Oct 6): Milwaukee, 1932, and a runaway cheese heiress; The Place of Tides — James Rebanks ($18.99, Oct 13), the Lake District shepherd's spring on a Norwegian eider-duck island; Marce Catlett — Wendell Berry ($16.95, Oct 6), the last Port William novel; The Rose Field — Philip Pullman ($16.99, Oct 20), the end of The Book of Dust; The Gales of November — John U. Bacon ($21.99, Oct 27), the Edmund Fitzgerald, two weeks ahead of the anniversary.

New and Notable: Nature

For the Love of Bats — Niki Desautels (out now). A Seattle bat conservationist's guide to the 32 species west of the Rockies: how they live, where to watch them, and how to put up a bat house. Go out at dusk and look up.

The Forest Year — Ethan Tapper (Timber, Oct 6), a Vermont forester's twelve months on 175 acres of worn-out woods he is bringing back.

Bogland — Merritt R. Turetsky (Norton, Oct 13). Bog bodies, carnivorous plants and black flies

Animals Taught Me Everything — Pam Houston (Oct 13). Fifteen essays on the wolfhounds, horses, sheep and one desert lioness in her life.

Bird Anatomy — Julia Rothman (Oct 13). How a feather is built and how an albatross drinks seawater.

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2026 (Oct 20). Randall Munroe of xkcd went looking for pieces that explain how we know what we know.

The Genre Shelf

Off the Reservation — Stephen Graham Jones (Oct 13). A follow-up to The Only Good Indians. Nate Yellow Tail and three older Blackfeet take a camper van to bring home the bones of a boy who died at the Carlisle Indian School. Something else comes back with them.

The Bishop of Durham Attempts to Surrender the City — Susanna Clarke (Oct 20). Back in the world of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. In 1110, Durham wakes surrounded by trees, and its bishop sets out to surrender to the leader of the fairy host, who is fourteen.

Solace House — Will Maclean (Oct 13). A summer job clearing out a derelict Victorian mansion, and a dead owner's journals with coded instructions for getting somewhere else.

Find Me Where It Ends — Cassandra Khaw (Oct 6). A novella. In Antigone's family, death always arrives as a black dog. When hers turns up at the front door, she lets it in.

Famous Last Words

Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

Shirley Jackson · The Haunting of Hill House

Jackson ends her novel on the sentence that closes its first paragraph. Everything happens in between, and the house doesn't notice. Leave a light on.