We're celebrating Reading this month in honor of World Book Day, One Dog-Eared Page at a Time (no wait –we have bookmarks!)
At Allport Editions, we’re big believers in the power of the written word, whether it’s stamped on a greeting card, scribbled in a notebook, or pressed between the pages of a well-loved book. To celebrate National Reading Month, we asked the readers on our team to share their favorite books (they were all sad to find out they could only pick 3). True to form, our answers ranged from the poetic to the absurd, the classic to the cozy. Basically, if our office were a library, it would have its own wing for emotional devastation and another just for misfit geniuses.
Based on their bookshelves, here’s a lovingly unscientific analysis of some of my brilliant co-workers. Get to know them the best way I know how: through the stories they return to, recommend, and pretend they don’t quietly build their personalities around.
At Allport: Meg keeps the digital storefront in shape, managing e-commerce, product listings, and customer support. She also helps with retail receiving and web updates, approaching each task with positivity, all while telling you the latest interesting fact she’s come across.
Bookshelf Analysis: Someone who listens closely to people, to landscapes, to silence and names things with care because words carry weight. Her shelves are rooted in curiosity, reverence, and the kind of wonder that doesn’t raise its voice. These are books that unfold slowly but leave something blooming behind: questions about perception, ethics, ecosystems, and what it means to belong to the earth instead of just living on it. There’s stillness here, but it hums with intention, like a quiet fire under soft moss.
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer – A book that asks you to slow down, touch the ground, and listen. Blending Indigenous knowledge, Western science, and memoir, Kimmerer doesn’t just describe the natural world—she’s in conversation with it. You come away from this book wanting to thank the moss, apologize to the rivers, and plant something on purpose. It’s gentle, but not soft. It's a call to remember that we belong to the earth (not the other way around) and that reciprocity isn’t a metaphor, it’s a survival strategy. Reads like a prayer whispered to a seed and a reminder that naming things with love is its own kind of medicine.
Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott – What starts as a quirky little Victorian novella about a square navigating a two dimensional world slowly morphs into a wildly relevant critique of class, power, and the limits of our imagination. It’s part satire, part geometry fever dream, and somehow still one of the most mind expanding things you’ll ever read. Every time you think you’ve grasped it, it slips sideways into a new layer, kind of like the concept of privilege. Weird? Yes. Necessary? Also yes. Especially if you like your math metaphysical and your metaphors unnervingly sharp.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley – Not just the OG science fiction novel, but a gut-punch meditation on creation, responsibility, and the loneliness of being made without consent. It’s easy to remember the monster, but harder to sit with the fact that he only became monstrous after being abandoned by the man who built him. The story asks: what do we owe to what we create? And what does it mean to be human, if not seen as one? Shelley (who was a teenager, by the way) wrote something colder than horror and sharper than tragedy. She saw the Enlightenment’s blind spots and cracked them open before most of its architects were even done congratulating themselves.
What I’ve realized while putting this together is that our reading lives are just as different and beautiful as the cards we sell. We love books that ask hard questions, make us laugh unexpectedly, or just remind us that connection is what we’re all here for, whether through words, worlds, or wildly specific lore.
This month, grab something from your shelf… or better yet, someone else’s (support your local library & independent bookstores), and sink into a story. Revisit a favorite, get haunted by footnotes, cry about marshes, spiral over moral philosophy, or finally figure out what’s actually happening in Flatland (if you do, please report back).
So, Happy World Book Day from some of the bookish weirdos at Allport Editions, including myself, who is currently finishing The Murderbot Diaries: System Collapse by Martha Wells (A surprisingly sentimental, socially anxious security robot hacks itself in order to be left alone to watch soap operas, but keeps getting dragged into saving humans) and using this post as an excuse to sneak in one last book recommendation. You’re welcome.
Stay tuned to get to know more of the fabulous team that makes up Allport Editions! I might be biased, but I think they’re pretty awesome
Until next time,
Sam