Sunday, Jan. 26: “My vision was: What if Aragorn had been a woman? What if a realm awaited the return of a queen?”

Friday, January 17: Matthew Goodman reads The City Game at Oblong Books in Rhinebeck.

Uncle Skallywag is the latest collection of poems by Shivastan’s proprietor, tantric Buddhist/Hindu yogi, anthropologist, archivist, artist, photographer, publisher and poet Shiv Mirabito.

Sunday, Dec. 15: Pagels is best-known for research and publication involving a cache of over 50 ancient Greek texts discovered translated into Coptic in Upper Egypt in 1945. After completing her doctorate at Harvard University, she participated with an international team of scholars to edit, translate and publish several of these texts as The Gnostic Gospels. It was the loss of her young son that inspired her deep exploration on the questions asked in this illuminating book.

Saturday, Dec. 7: Cooper, the author of the much-loved, Newbery Medal-winning five-book series The Dark Is Rising, learned to love literature in the family bomb shelter as her mother read aloud by candlelight to pass the time during the Blitz.

Sometimes described as a “National Geographic for Millennials,” Atlas Obscura was founded in 2009 by journalist Joshua Foer and documentary filmmaker Dylan Thuras. In 2016, the company began organizing guided tours to some of the remarkable sites that it describes so enticingly. That same year, it also published its first book for the armchair traveler: Atlas Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders (Workman). Now a brand-new Second Edition has just been released, adding more than 100 new places and featuring a dozen city guides and a fold-out map for a round-the-world dream itinerary. A version for younger readers, The Atlas Obscura Explorer’s Guide for the World’s Most Adventurous Kid, was released in the fall of 2018.

In a contrary motion that J. S. Bach likely would have appreciated, Like Falling through a Cloud moves from an ethereal, poetic confusion in its earliest pages toward an all-too-grounded diagnostic clarity as the reality sinks in and the author advances, often with great reluctance, from consultation to consultation as the unnamable is named.