5 Books to Add to Your Fall Reading List

The transition of seasons can trigger change within as we swap out our summer clothes, adjust our morning beverages to align with the season, and slowly but surely start to embrace a sense of coziness. With the drop in the temperatures and each sunset creeping in earlier and earlier, the atmosphere makes it much more enticing to settle into our self-made dens, carving out a spot on the couch, staying inside, and truly feeling at home.

What better way to lean into these feelings than with a book? So, for those pockets in your day, we’ve curated a list of books that embrace the rē•spin pillars and strive to cultivate an eternal, enlightened space within.

1. A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle

rē•spin’s founder, Halle Berry, first put this title on our radar in her #HBBooksFromBed Instagram series last summer. A New Earth translates Tolle’s expertise and teachings into a spiritual manifesto for building a better life and world.

In his previous book, The Power of Now, written nearly one decade before, Tolle emphasized how living in the present moment brings freedom and joy. A New Earth expands upon this revelation, exploring the idea that we must awaken from our ego-conditioned states to cultivate personal happiness — and ultimately begin to end the conflicts occurring across the globe. Throughout the book, Tolle teaches that we can unlearn the ego-based state and adopt a new form of consciousness for a more fulfilling existence moving forward.

2. Stop Missing Your Life by Cory Muscara

We’ve all been told to be more present, but embodying the phrase’s true meaning is another matter altogether. In this read, Muscara explores how to achieve Presence, a state that comes after we strip back the guarded layers acting as roadblocks. The process reveals our true, honest selves, which can then be embraced. Because we’ve spent years on guard, putting up walls within, Muscara unlocks this internal process for dismantling them — thus facilitating outward change. 

3. “How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community” by Mia Birdsong

Divisive rhetoric in society has led us to collectively forget the sense of community that once bound people together. Birdsong explores what separates people in contemporary times, from injustices around race, class, beliefs, and gender, but also the seemingly absent sense of inherent interconnection. How We Show Up uses interviews, research, and recounts experiences to show that it can return to this sense of community and find strength, support, and accountability in the process. 

4. Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May

Periods of stagnancy can be brought on in a moment by unforeseen circumstances. These difficult life phases may induce a wide range of emotions or perhaps are devoid of feelings altogether. Wintering follows author Katherine May after a series of personal events that put her through a painful time and explores how she found power in a method of rest and retreat. Through her book, May offers a guide on taking the hardship that comes with life and rē-framing them into natural cycles that can be understood and how to adapt to them so they serve us.

Bacon has said that belonging was a formative struggle for them, as it is for many marginalized individuals. They wrote Radical Belonging as a personal manifesto to heal from trauma — both individual and collective — and to shift society to a culture of belonging rather than one of ”othering.” Bacon takes the opportunity to go to the root of these feelings, exploring their sociological, political, biological, and psychological foundations, revealing that it is injustice causing this sense of not-belonging, not you. Radical Belonging acts as a guidebook on creating a society that values, welcomes, and accepts everybody and everybody.