I don’t like snow and I don’t like the cold, but somehow I’ve been cursed to live in the Midwest where the weather never seems appropriate for my internal body temperature. Remaining inside is the best option, where I can regulate the heat, and keep coronavirus germs far away from my unvaccinated body. Still, I worry about that desolate feeling that creeps in after the holidays, when I start to realize that there’s nothing to look forward to until the weather warms up and I have to endure months of cold and ice and snow.
These ten books represent those feelings—but they’re also good, so read them!
If you like The Thing you will like Dan Simmons’s creepy, arctic horror novelization of the doomed 1845 Franklin Expedition. Although this novel has a supernatural element, it is nature that is the true horror in this book.
In Sunlight Pilgrims, the world is ending and all that’s left is survival. Although most people are moving south to escape the impending freeze, Dylan is determined to make it back to his home in Scotland to bury his mother and grandmother’s ashes. In the highlands, he meets Estella and her mother Constance and they prepare to meet the end together.
I read this book when I was an adult and loved it.
The novel Ice was published in 1967 and its protagonist is an icy blonde heroine, pursued by two men with questionable intentions. The book seems to take place in a post-apocalyptical world, most likely destroyed through nuclear war, and overrun with walls of ice. It’s surreal and hallucinatory, with an ever- evolving landscape.
This is part adventure novel, part travelogue, part philosophical examination of our connection with nature. It’s visual and visceral, and completely unique.
It’s a very pretty book, at times feeling more like poetry than prose, which lends itself to the desolate atmosphere that becomes beautiful through the lyricism of Tanya Tagaq’s writing.
It’s about a Tokyo dilettante and a country geisha who fall in love on an isolated mountain surrounded by snow and hot springs. This is a slim novel at only 175 pages, but it doesn’t waste a word and remains savory until the end.
