What I’m Reading This Autumn - A Slow Living Edit
There's a particular kind of reading that belongs to autumn. Not the beach novel or the airport thriller - something slower. Something you return to with a cup of tea and a blanket and the feeling that there's nowhere else you need to be.
As the days shorten and the light turns golden across the Central Coast, we find ourselves reaching for books that match the season - texts about craft, nature, simplicity, and the kind of beauty that doesn't ask anything of you except to notice it.
This is not a comprehensive list. It's a personal one. Five books we're reading (or rereading) this autumn, chosen because they changed how we think about the things we make, the things we carry, and the way we move through the world.
1. Wabi-Sabi: For Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers — Leonard Koren
This small, spare book has been on our studio shelf for years. It's the kind of text you can read in an afternoon and think about for a decade. Koren describes wabi-sabi as the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete - a philosophy that sits at the heart of everything we make at Stitch & Hide. Our leather ages. It scratches and softens. It becomes more beautiful with time, not less. This book is the reason we believe that.
2. The Craefts — Alexander Langlands
Langlands traces the human history of making things by hand - from tanning leather to weaving baskets to building stone walls. It's a reminder that the skills we now call 'artisan' were once simply the way people lived. Our manufacturers in India carry this lineage. Every bag is cut, stitched, and finished by hand. Reading Langlands makes you understand why that matters.
3. Braiding Sweetgrass — Robin Wall Kimmerer
Part memoir, part science, part meditation on gratitude. Kimmerer writes about the relationship between people and the natural world with a gentleness that slows you down just by reading it. It's a book about reciprocity - about taking only what you need and giving something back. We think about this a lot when we talk about sustainability. Not as a marketing term, but as a way of being.
4. Notes on a Nervous Planet — Matt Haig
This one is for the days when the noise of the world feels like too much. Haig writes about anxiety, consumerism, and the relentless pace of modern life with clarity and compassion. It's the kind of book that makes you put your phone down and go outside. And maybe pack a little less. And maybe need a little less. Which, for a brand that makes bags, is a strange thing to recommend - but we've always believed that carrying less is carrying better.
5. The Old Ways — Robert Macfarlane
Macfarlane walks the ancient paths of Britain and beyond, and writes about landscape, memory, and the marks we leave on the earth. It's a book about journeys - the slow kind, the kind where the walking is the point. We love it because it reminds us that travel doesn't have to mean airports and itineraries. Sometimes it just means putting on your boots and following a track to see where it goes.
Reading slowly is a practice, like anything else. It asks you to be present. To sit with ideas rather than scroll past them. To let a sentence change the shape of your afternoon.
And if you need a bookmark - our 100% recycled cardboard swing tags, threaded with natural cotton twine, were made for exactly this. Sturdy enough to hold your place through a long autumn. Beautiful enough to leave pressed between the pages of a book you love. A small circle completed: recycled materials given a second life, marking the page of a story about living with less waste and more intention.