Plus, a list of our favorites from the FP Library…

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From contributor Gemma Janes, founder of UK-based sendb00ks.

This October I spent a month in my parents' shed, which I have converted into a small library. It is set back on the edge of a wood in the very middle of England where pine trees dart upwards and their branches fall and become tangled around older oaks. I have lived in cities for years, but my true focus always leads me back here, surrounded by damp ferns uncurling.

Since its inception in 2018, Sendb00ks has worked out of wherever it could: tiny au pair apartments, friends’ offices, Marlene and Marie’s houses in Berlin… taking the book collection I should have personally accumulated and instead sharing it by postal service as a book subscription service. Sendb00ks dispatches around 200 books a month to a thriving network of readers.

Over the last four years there is a marked increase in the number of 18- to 24-year-olds reading novels. Not only new books, but classics, too – young people looking for solace and inspiration from the likes of Jane Austin, Virginia Woolf and George Eliot, writers whose words written 100 years ago still ring true today. It comes as no surprise that, in a world so dominated by screens, millennials may actually desire more offline interaction.

I like to leave my phone at home and take a novel and notebook to a cafe. Books feel like a different way to digest information. They allow a more present participation in our world. The physical action of looking up from a page in a book at the cafe in front of you seems to add a new dimension to the experience. It is reading and looking with another set of eyes. This does not feel (for me anyway) the case with reading words on a screen. In 2021 physical books still sold more than e-books. It is in our hands and best done in a slant of natural light. I move around the room to find the place where I can have my concentration focused, I corn the pages, I balance my elbows on the edge of the bath.

There is pleasure, too, in the physical interaction that exists between people who share books or give them as gifts. It is a way to say, “I read this in my solitude and it gave me pleasure, so I hope it will offer you that same feeling.” We can look at the underlinings and annotations as a conversation between the reader and the writer. And then, if the reader enjoys reading aloud, there is a way to share the space where imagination grows. I recommend this act during the winter with Roald Dahl’s adult stories. There is a kind of serendipity about a book finding its way to us, whether it be on a bench in the street. If I ever lose a book, I rest assured that it will find its way into the right hands.

Winter could come as an invitation to insulate and slow down… so with this in mind I suggest a book – Leonora Carrinton’s “The Hearing Trumpet,” a surrealist masterpiece with cover artwork designed by Augusta Lardy. Sendb00ks has nearly sold out of the packages that will include this story, but we encourage you to support your local bookshop or library and to see what else you end up gravitating towards. Lately, we have also discovered the writing of Derek Jarman, who came as the perfect accompaniment to these moments in the shed as he documents the changes of his garden over a year in Dungeness, England.

See below for a collection of travel, nature and lifestyle books that make for great gifts, and allow us to enter other countries, worlds, concepts and minds with our hands around them.