Lake Bluff Public Library and Lake Forest Library are proud to present our seventh annual Read Between the Ravines. This Two Communities, One Nonfiction Book program brings together the Lake Bluff and Lake Forest communities with the purpose of enhancing nonfiction literacy and inspiring discussion around real-world issues. Our 2026 selection is The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year by Margaret Renkl. 

2025 Featured Book

The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year by Margaret Renkl

About the Book
In The Comfort of Crows, Margaret Renkl presents a literary devotional: fifty-two chapters that follow the creatures and plants in her backyard over the course of a year. As we move through the seasons—from a crow spied on New Year’s Day, its resourcefulness and sense of community setting a theme for the year, to the lingering bluebirds of December, revisiting the nest box they used in spring—what develops is a portrait of joy and grief: joy in the ongoing pleasures of the natural world, and grief over winters that end too soon and songbirds that grow fewer and fewer. 

Along the way, we also glimpse the changing rhythms of a human life. Grown children, unexpectedly home during the pandemic, prepare to depart once more. Birdsong and night-blooming flowers evoke generations past. The city and the country where Renkl raised her family transform a little more with each passing day. And the natural world, now in visible flux, requires every ounce of hope and commitment from the author—and from us. For, as Renkl writes, “radiant things are bursting forth in the darkest places, in the smallest nooks and deepest cracks of the hidden world.” 

With fifty-two original color artworks by the author’s brother, Billy Renkl, The Comfort of Crows is a lovely and deeply moving book from a cherished observer of the natural world.

Borrow from Lake Bluff Library   Borrow from Lake Forest Library  

Lake Forest Bookstore is offering a 10% discount to customers who purchase the book and mention the 'Read Between the Ravines' program series.

About the Author

Margaret Renkl is the author of The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year, which won the 2024 Southern Book Prize and was Reese’s Book Club’s 100th pick. Her earlier books are Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss (2019), which won the Reed Environmental Writing Award in 2020; and Graceland, At Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South (2021), which won both the Southern Book Prize and the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay in 2022. The companion journal for The Comfort of Crows—Leaf, Cloud, Crow: A Weekly Backyard Journal—is available now.

Since 2017, Renkl has served as a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, where her essays appear on the first and third Mondays of the month. (You can read them here.) The founding editor of Chapter 16, a daily literary publication of Humanities Tennessee, and a graduate of Auburn University and the University of South Carolina, she lives in Nashville.