On the January day that I first visited The Astorian newsroom, that cubic midcentury building on Exchange Street with what must be a leaning sequoia tree as its roadside landmark, I encountered at what was to be my desk a tall stack of books.

Many of these were authored by locals and had come with additional notes or at least signatures, some with letters of praise for past articles in the paper. The books were about cranberry fields and butterflies, the travels of Lewis and Clark and chronicles of shipwrecks near the Columbia River Bar.

One by one, I started taking them home. As of this week, that first encounter will have been one year ago. And although I didn’t settle into Astoria until some months later, that’s most of one year that I’ve spent getting to know the places and the histories in those books. And I’ve even had the pleasure of stumbling upon a few of the authors themselves.

To date, I’ve taken journeys through the imagined landscapes of Robert Michael Pyle and Brian Doyle, consulted a couple of field guides on local birds and native plants, read from a guide on the art of razor clamming (though I haven’t tried it), explored cranberry harvesting through Oysterville historian Sydney Stevens and even found — at Jupiter’s Books in Cannon Beach — a historic chronicle by Roger T. Tetlow of The Astorian itself.

And although I’m ever short on time, winter is my prime reading season, short on daylight and heavy on rain squalls. So let me know what I should add to my reading list for the new year at lbrewer@dailyastorian.com.