Culture
Winter Books to Read When It’s Cold Outside
Frigid storms, heaps of snow and subzero temperatures are not exactly pleasant to live through, but winter weather can make for an irresistible setting for a book. From the cool surface of a frozen lake to the dizzying frenzy of a white-out squall, the dead of winter offers countless evocative and extreme conditions that conjure magic, channel heartbreak and push characters to their limits. The long nights and biting cold also make easy grist for atmosphere: Even in the coziest of reading nooks, the wintry chill can seem to leap from the very best winter books’ pages, making you clutch your mug of tea a little closer.
As we slog through the January doldrums and temperatures in much of the United States dip to polar levels, it can help to embrace the spirit of the season. Here are 10 books that feel ice-cold from the first page.
By Heather Gudenkauf
When the true crime writer Wylie Lark discovers an unconscious child outside her remote cabin in rural Iowa, she becomes embroiled in a mystery worthy of one of her macabre books. But the real terror comes from the elements, as an unrelenting winter storm traps Lark and the child inside. Gudenkauf weaves together three stories across three time periods in this unsettling and sometimes brutal thriller. As the threads converge, you can practically feel the bitter winds lashing against the cabin walls.
Read our review.
By Naomi Novik
“I could see nothing but winter, all around,” Miryem, one of the narrators of Novik’s glorious fantasy novel observes as she is swept into the icy kingdom of the powerful, fae-like Staryk. Billed as a retelling of “Rumpelstiltskin,” this Hugo Award nominee is in fact an uncanny blend of several Eastern European fairy tales, myths and legends, remixed in a style that feels wholly original. In this novel, it isn’t just the weather that can turn cold: “Thrice you shall turn silver to gold for me,” the Staryk king threatens Miryem, “or be changed to ice yourself.”
Read our review.
By Taylor Adams
This thrilling novel opens on a Colorado highway in the middle of a blizzard, and the weather only worsens from there. Adams uses the harsh conditions to sequester his cast of suspicious strangers inside a secluded service station without Wi-Fi or cell service, setting the stage for a classic locked-room mystery. When Darby Thorne, a college student, discovers a possible kidnapping victim in one of the vehicles parked at the rest stop, she has to determine which of her fellow stranded travelers is responsible — all while waiting for the storm to relent and the roads to be cleared.
By James Salter
One of the great American adventure novels, “Solo Faces” follows the daring exploits of Verne Rand, a self-reliant roofer who absconds from California to the Swiss Alps. There, he commits himself to the monumental task of scaling some of the most imposing mountains in the world, including the Eiger, the Grandes Jorasses and the Aiguille du Dru. Salter renders these treacherous ascents in spartan, crystalline prose, finding in the death-defying thrills of mountaineering something like a religious experience. It’s a beautiful book, with writing as icy as the alpine peaks.
Read our review.
By Darcy Coates
A group of tourists, stranded in an abandoned cabin during a snowstorm, wake up after their first bitterly cold night in the woods to find their tour guide butchered, and his severed head impaled on the branch of a tree. That’s the grisly setup for this violent, claustrophobic parlor mystery, which reads like a slasher version of Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None.” The body count is high, the murders are inventive and the gore is vivid, but it’s the snow that gets top billing, surrounding the characters on all sides as the tension mounts and the blood continues to pour.
Read our review.
By John Williams
A western concerned with the demise of the American West, “Butcher’s Crossing,” by the cult-favorite author of “Stoner,” tells the story of an ill-fated 1870s buffalo hunt in the Colorado Rockies that is disrupted by the sudden onset of a winter storm. The book’s hero is Will Andrews, an idealistic college student, who gets lured into this folly by an ambitious, fortune-seeking hunter named Miller. The novel’s unromantic naturalism, as well as its grim view of American exceptionalism and frontier hubris, draws frequent comparisons to Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian,” but the despairing winter chill that pervades the story is distinctly its own.
Read our review.
By Claire Keegan
Keegan’s short, bittersweet book is set in Ireland over the Christmas holidays of 1985, and she makes you feel the season’s every errant gust and snowflake as the protagonist, the unassuming Bill Furlong, makes his rounds delivering the village’s coal each morning. When Furlong discovers the disturbing secrets hidden within the cloistered walls of the local convent — to describe them any further would ruin the mystery — he’s put in an impossible position, left to determine whether he can summon a measure of warmth for his fellow man amid the dreary Irish landscape.
Read our review, and listen to our editors discuss the novel on the Book Review podcast.
By Stephen King
Written in the aftermath of a car accident that left him needing months of physical rehabilitation, King’s underrated “Dreamcatcher” feels very much like the work of a man in pain — the agony manifesting, in typical King fashion, as a ruthless alien parasite that gestates in the lower intestines of its victims before bursting out of their backsides. The book’s heroes, a quartet of lifelong friends from King’s favored town of Derry, contend with the alien invaders in the woods of Maine amid an overwhelming blizzard, which gives the story its suitably chilling backdrop.
By Owen Beattie and John Geiger
In “Frozen in Time,” the Canadian authors Beattie and Geiger delve into the longstanding mystery of the Franklin Expedition, a failed 19th-century voyage in search of the Northwest Passage that left two British ships, the Erebus and the Terror, stranded in the Arctic ice and their entire crews dead. Beattie and Geiger capture the excitement and peril of the explorers’ harrowing journey through polar conditions and, drawing on comprehensive forensic research, offer a compelling explanation of what might have transpired over their final weeks and days (including, in a final act of desperation, cannibalism). It’s a serious historical work, but also a riveting account of a truly extraordinary expedition.
By Dan Simmons
If the true story of the Franklin Expedition isn’t quite exciting enough, you may prefer “The Terror,” Simmons’s fictionalized dramatization that turns the real-life Arctic voyage into a larger-than-life battle with the supernatural. Beattie and Geiger’s research suggests that the crews of the Erebus and the Terror may have suffered from hallucinations after contracting lead poisoning from spoiled tinned provisions. Simmons cleverly folds this fact into his thriller, in which his cast of sailors must fight a bloodthirsty monster while also gradually going insane.
Read our review. And if you’re still hungry for more Franklin Expedition fare, you might also enjoy AMC’s series adaptation of Simmons’s book, or Kaliane Bradley’s romance novel “The Ministry of Time,” in which one of the explorers, Graham Gore, is plucked from the ice and transported to the future.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
Take me to visit a dysfunctional family with oceanfront real estate
by Meg Mitchell Moore
Moore is a dependable ingredient in any summer reading soufflé. Her airy novels accomplish what they came to do: entertain and transport, without the pyrotechnics of, say, books that eschew quotation marks. In “Down With the Shipmans,” three sisters, laden with baggage, converge on their late mother’s beach cottage, only to learn that their father and his much younger wife are planning to sell the place.
The stakes are high, the drama is juicy and the views are sublime. Moore even provides two beach dogs — Leo (an unruly pit bull mix) and Cinnamon (“golden retriever, red bandanna, long pink tongue”) — to keep things lively. (Comes out June 2)
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