These titles remind us of the season’s long-established joys and its necessary quiet, even as the climate changes.
If winter feels a bit wrong to you these days, you’re right. For the past few months, across the United States, people have been dealing with record-breaking cold temperatures, unusually low snowfall, or dramatic precipitation—phenomena that have become more common recently, as the traditional rhythms of the season have been in flux. Even as some places deal with unexpected cold, winter is shrinking across the globe as a result of human-driven climate change, according to a study published last month in Nature. The planet is rapidly losing its snowpack, and the declines are the most significant in the southwestern and northeastern United States.
I grew up in New England and now live in the southwest corner of Colorado, both regions that are especially vulnerable to the warming atmosphere. I love snowy winters—I wrote a book on the complicated joy of skiing—but I can feel them changing, as once-dependable yearly storms now seem not to arrive, or while I trudge around in unseasonable mud. I’m alarmed, not only for myself, but because I know that in cold places, so much—tourism economies, water supplies—depends on snow. Much hotter, drier months will upend these ways of life, and when I take it all in, I feel a hazy, hard-to-grasp grief.
And so, like I often do during this time, I’ve turned to reading to make my way through it. The six books below remind us of winter’s long-established joys and its necessary, restful quiet. Even as the seasons change around us, they offer a way to think about holding on to both the light and the dark.
Wintering, by Katherine May
“Everybody winters at some time or another,” May writes in her book about the physical and psychic reality of cold, dark times. May herself hits a hard time late one year when her husband gets sick, her kid stops going to school, and she ends up quitting her job to cope with the emotional fallout. She’s feeling like her life is spiraling, but her unintentional pause gives her space to look at how life is cyclical, not just linear, and to understand what it really means to winter. Tracking her own biography and following the course of a season, she explores the ways we benefit from being fallow for a while. She looks at long-standing traditions, such as solstice festivals and fairy tales, digs into the bracing, brain-resetting benefits of cold-water swimming, and wonders why we’ve culturally undervalued connection and slowing down. Part memoir, part cultural and natural history, the book is a clear, engaging lesson on how dangerous and lonely it is to avoid rest, and how we need winter, in our bodies and in our minds.
Read: The secret to loving winter
Two in the Far North, by Margaret E. Murie
Anyone who finds it annoying to go about their day when it’s cold outside may shiver at the life of Murie, a conservationist who grew up in Fairbanks, Alaska, and then dedicated herself to the wild in 1924, when she married Olaus Murie, a backcountry wildlife biologist who became the head of the Wilderness Society. Two in the Far North, her highly visual memoir, starts with her childhood but gets really good after she and Olaus set off on their honeymoon, tracking animals by dogsled deep in the bush. She covers the brutality and the beauty of being out alone; the pair depend on their own ingenuity as well as on the kindness of the few people they encounter on the trail. She details frustrating and terrifying instances, such as trying to grind uphill through brush and deep snow with a heavily loaded 14-foot sled, but she’s also quick to see the highlights, such as watching the light change on the icy Yukon River. At its core, this story is one of adaptation and being open to the environment around you. “There’s a trick, you know, to traveling on glare ice,” Olaus tells her at one point as they’re walking across a frozen river. “Pretend your knees are made of jelly and that there are really no bones in your feet either, and you don’t care if you do fall, and you’ll get along fine.”
Firekeeper’s Daughter, by Angeline Boulley
Boulley’s young-adult novel about hockey and crime sounds on its face like a hammy cozy winter mystery, but Firekeeper’s Daughter manages to mix mistaken identity and sex with sports and the FBI without becoming a simple whodunit. The plot is powerful, subtle, and propulsive: It follows 18-year-old Daunis as she gets pulled into an investigation of the influx of meth that’s been plaguing the Sugar Island Ojibwe reservation, on the eastern edge of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and the surrounding community. Boulley zeroes in on race, tribal trust in the government, and the way teenagers often aren’t taken seriously, even when they’re burdened with a lot. Daunis, who is of mixed descent and isn’t federally enrolled in the tribe, has to decide whom she can rely on and which relationships she should privilege above others. Her story contains the darkness and isolation of the season, but the solutions come from Daunis’s ingenuity and the way she combines tribal knowledge with the types of facts that the FBI considers valid; she’s a narrator who feels the weight of the past while trying to do right by her own generation.
Read: Boston is losing its snow wicked fast
Winter World, by Bernd Heinrich
In Winter World, Heinrich, a longtime University of Vermont biology professor, scrutinizes with unbridled, nerdy glee the ways animals survive the brutal New England winters in his own backyard. Heinrich is clear-eyed and a charming stickler for detail: He learns how many seeds a chipmunk can store in its cheek pouches by experimentally stuffing the cheeks of one he finds dead. His exactitude makes the book clear, not ponderous, and it’s full of juicy bits, such as how hibernating bears turn their urine into creatine, the compound favored by bodybuilders, so they stay in shape. Heinrich identifies patterns, similarities, and skills without anthropomorphizing. “Life is played out on the anvil of ice and under the hammer of deprivation,” he writes. “For those that endure until spring, existence is reduced to its elegant essentials.” It’s sort of a relief to remember that humans aren’t actually that well adapted to the cold, and that animals do things we never could—like cutting off blood supply to legs or toes, or sending antifreeze through their veins. As with Wintering, the beauty of this book lies in its attention to what shines amid all the gray.
Tinkers, by Paul Harding
Winter is an internal season, and in Harding’s skinny novel, which covers the eight days before the ailing Mainer George Washington Crosby passes away, we are pulled into a man’s interior world. Surrounded by his family, George is nevertheless trapped both in the house and in his failing body, and as he slowly ticks through the hours before death, his mind is filled with the history of his absent epileptic father, who took off in George’s youth. George became a clock repairman in his old age; both he and his father were tinkers and hoarders, trying to provide for their families but unsure of how. When his father shows up on George’s doorstep unannounced one Christmas, the two can’t find a way to be comfortable with each other. Tinkers is a book about craft, inheritance, and survival in brutal times, and it won the Pulitzer Prize in part for its careful language: “Your cold mornings are filled with the heartache about the fact that although we are not at ease in this world, it is all we have. That it is ours but that it is full of strife, so that all we can call our own is strife; but even that is better than nothing at all, isn’t it?”
Read: The benefits of thinking of your life in seasons
Stolen, by Ann-Helén Laestadius
When 9-year-old Elsa skis up on a poacher killing one of her family’s reindeer, she’s thrust into an ongoing, violent conflict over Indigenous Sámi cultural practices. Men in her Swedish village are resentful about the Sámi right to range and herd, there is conflict over a mine’s proposed expansion that would drastically alter the landscape but bring jobs, the local police are turning a blind eye, and reindeer, which the Sámi see as the core of their heritage, keep being found dead. Laestadius, whose mother is Sámi, carefully looks at how long-term abuse makes people violent and angry, and how microaggressions can pile up over time. It’s a lot for a kid to process, and as Elsa gets older, she tries to manage those wounds while attempting to solve what her community sees as hate crimes; meanwhile, the authorities are dismissive of the offenses against the Sámi. Stolen gets into the ways that outsiders react when Indigenous cultures modernize, how climate change is affecting people who have always lived in the North, and how these complicated factors damage the mental health of people living close to the land.
When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Rami G Khouri
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
visit website
