ArboReaders Book Club

Saturday, November 14, 2026 2:00 – 3:30 PM CHA, in collaboration with the Nature of Reading Bookshop in Madison, is excited to share our next ArboReaders book choice, Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival by Maria Pinto. Read at your leisure and the join the discussion at our next meeting in November. Light refreshments will be served. Interested individuals are welcome to join us, whether you have attended in the past or not. This is a free event for adults 18 years and older. Register for Free You can purchase books and support The Nature of Reading Bookshop here. Naturalist, forager, and educator Maria Pinto offers a stunning debut book that uncovers strange and beautiful fungal connections between the natural and human worlds. She mingles reportage, research, memoir, and nature writing, touching on topics that range from Black farmers’ domestication of the unforgettable aroma of truffles to the possibility that enslaved people wielded mycological poisons against their enslavers. Pinto brings a new perspective and a distinctive literary voice to this mix of environmental and lived history, and every page sings with her enthusiasm for the networks in which we are embedded: fungal, ecological, ancestral, and communal. Join her in pursuit of beautiful, perplexing, delicious, and deadly mushrooms as she explores this understudied kingdom’s awe-inspiring diversity and discovers how fungi have been used by people, especially those on the margins, for survival, pleasure, revelation, and revolution.