In Iceland, the tradition of Jólabókaflóð, or the book flood, includes gifting everyone in the family a book and then settling in for an evening of reading with a warm beverage. We love this take on a silent, and cozy night during a busy season. Whether you are making your book list for the feast of Sinterklaas, or just choosing a volume for your well-earned quiet time, The Nest team has a few titles to recommend.
The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Like Robin Wall Kimmerer’s celebrated book, Braiding Sweetgrass, this prose draws on the plant kingdom for an example of a more intentional and purposeful life. The serviceberry provides abundant fruit with the birds and animals in the surrounding ecosystem. In sharing, the plant ensures its own survival. Kimmerer contrasts this sharing economy that builds a thriving community with the human economy based on scarcity, greed, and resource depletion.
Reciprocity is not a new idea for our community of impact investment. But reconnecting with our purpose through Kimmerer’s elegant, and concise book is less like learning new ideas than a meditation and recharge of spirit. That too, is necessary.
The Book of Hope
Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams
After the loss of one of the world’s foremost naturalists in 2025, we decided to spend some time with the words of wisdom she left for us all. The Book of Hope, published in 2021, focuses on Goodall’s four reasons for hope amidst climate change and biodiversity loss: The Amazing Human Intellect, The Resilience of Nature, The Power of Young People, and The Indomitable Human Spirit.
Goodall explains that hope is not naïve. Rather, it can be a powerful motivation to continue in adversity. The book is formatted as an interview between Goodall and Abrams, with Goodall using storytelling to convey her rationale for optimism. The audiobook format was especially powerful, as it was recorded by the authors. At times, the authors’ words are prescient, and just as relevant for the current challenges as during the 2020 pandemic when much of the interview took place. In the closing of the book, Goodall shares her comforting perspective on her next and final adventure. The Book of Hope is a celebration of Goodall’s legacy, and a gift of hope for this season.
The Blue Plate: A Food Lover’s Guide to Climate Chaos
Mark Easter
Mark Easter’s book, The Blue Plate, is reminiscent of The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, a book that helped launch the local food movement. While Pollan compared the food systems behind different meals, Easter’s book begins with a dinner party menu: seafood, salad, bread, chicken, steak, potatoes, and fruit pie with ice cream.
Easter explores the climate, human, and food system impacts of how each menu item was grown, produced, harvested, and shipped. As an ecologist, Easter’s perspective is strong on science, but approachable in plain language. The book helps us, as eaters, connect a direct line between plate and planet. Easter’s text, like a good dinner party host, engages the reader with storytelling. Easter unpacks the complexity of food and climate, as well as the solutions to this omnivore’s dilemma that are within reach.
The Revolutionary Genius of Plants: A New Understanding of Plant Intelligence and Behavior
Stefano Mancuso
The liana plant from the temperate forests of Chile can modify the shape, size, and color of its leaves to mimic another plant species nearby, evading predation. The feat mystifies scientists. How can a species without eyes conduct perfect mimicry? Are plants intelligent? Do they have memory or solve problems?
Mancuso, a renowned plant researcher, explores these questions with examples of plant species that secrete chemicals that control animal species around them, organize communities, respond to remembered stimuli, survive in the harshest of conditions, and form structures that inspire human engineering.
The book includes full color photos and illustrations to accompany Mancuso’s passion for the plant kingdom. This book will be a favorite for any plant lover on your list.
Jólabókaflóð at The Nest
During our strategic offsite, we made space for a simple but meaningful ritual: a team book exchange. Each of us brought a book that had left a mark - whether on regenerative agriculture, investing, travelling, cooking, or fiction - wrapped it up, and placed it into the mix without knowing who would receive it. Choosing a book was guided by intuition: even wrapped, some titles seemed to speak louder than others. The result was a small moment of surprise and connection, offering a sneak peek into one another’s bookshelves, curiosities, and sources of inspiration. A reminder that the ideas that shape us are often meant to be shared.
Wishing you a restful and inspiring end of the year filled with good reading, fresh perspectives, and time to recharge. May the pages you turn over the holidays spark ideas for the year ahead.