You can see it.  Hear it.  Feel it.  Taste it in the air.  It’s Autumn.  It’s October.  It’s the time for pulling the windows down and the covers up.  It’s the time for bedding small plants and tiny creatures under blankets of warm colors of fallen leaves.  A time for shaking out thick socks and long sweaters.  

October is also about harvesting:  from harvest moons and harvest festivals to picking apples and tree nuts, pumpkins and winter squash, sweet potatoes and sweet grapes for wine.  And, for me, October is the time for harvesting books.

October is the time I harvest and gather and glean stacks of books for winter consumption.  I pile them on tables and chairs and on the floor beside my bed.  They’re right there alongside the pinecones and cider and fuzzy slippers.

Mostly, I harvest “comfort books”:  usually the ones with old, yellowing pages, often those that I may have already read a few times before.  These are the books that shield me from modern fears and complications, chaos and harsh words.  (I agree with the Portuguese poet who wrote that “literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”) My comfort books open French doors and leaded-glass windows into imaginary places with kinder lives and softer edges, where the dog never dies. 

But I am also the aunt who always gives books for Christmas.  So I start harvesting my “gift books” in October, too.  I love to uncover books with strange titles and unexpected stories.  I like books about how to do odd things.  How to fold fancy napkins or bake la-dee-da cakes.  How to dance.  I try to find stories that make the reader think new thoughts or understand ancient wisdom or feel other peoples’ feelings.  And there are “read-aloud” books (not just for children).  And there are the histories of places and things.  I love books that are meant to be shared and passed along, sometimes with tiny notes written in faded pencil in the margins.

Part of the joy of harvesting books goes beyond the stories themselves, of course.  It’s the feel of the book in our hands or our laps, the pages against our fingers, the smell of the paper and ink, the feel of the words in our heads and our mouths, even the sound of the words that describe books and their makeup and aging – like gilt and foxing and fore-edges and deckle edges and obverse and quarto and yapped.

It’s been said (by best selling British author, Mark Haddon) that “reading is a conversation”; because all books speak to us, but some books – the best books – listen to us as well.  They hear our questions.  They meet us where we are in our lives.  They reflect us and reinvent us.  They restore us.  Harvesting books means finding the ones that are ripe for the picking right when we reach out to them.  They keep the very best fruits just for us, just when we need them.  They satisfy our hungers and fill our pockets with ideas and experiences and knowledge and journeys to take along with us wherever we go in life.  Perhaps especially in the bleak times of winter.  Perhaps that’s why October is the best month for harvesting them.

More than 300 years ago, a French wild child, who wrote under 178 different names – most notably, “Voltaire” – believed whole heartedly in the value and pure joy of books.  It was he who said:  “Let us read, let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.”

I suspect that, by declaring this as our season of harvesting books, we might enjoy the dance with them all the way into the first fruits of spring.