By four-thirty the light is gone, and Providence in late December does its annual impersonation of a town at the bottom of a well. I have stopped fighting it. There was a period of my life when I treated the dark months as an error to be corrected with lamps and resolve; now I treat them as a reading season with its own native literature, as distinct as anything on the summer table, and this note is a report from the solstice shelf.
Winter reading is its own genre, is the discovery. Not officially — no publisher stamps it on a spine — but every serious reader I know maintains the category by instinct. The qualifying marks: length, for one. The dark months want the long haul, the Russian shelf, the eight-hundred-pager you would never start in June. Partly it’s opportunity (the evenings are enormous; where else will the time go?), but partly it’s something structural: a long novel is a dwelling, and in winter you want to live somewhere, not visit. You move into The Brothers Karamazov in December the way you’d take a winter rental — hang your coat, learn the rooms, stop noticing the walls.
Snow in the text helps, no use pretending otherwise. There is a deep, slightly embarrassing pleasure in reading about cold while warm, which the philosophers of coziness — the Danes have the patent — understand completely: comfort requires a visible perimeter, and snow on the page is the perimeter. The Dead read in July is a masterpiece; read on the year’s shortest day, with actual weather ticking at the actual window, its last page does something to the chest that I decline to describe in front of strangers. The same principle governs the winter appetite for ghost stories, which the Victorians institutionalized at Christmas and we have foolishly let lapse: the M. R. James tale wants a dark window behind the reader. It is a seasonal fruit. Eaten out of season it’s fine. Eaten in season it’s the whole orchard.
The dark months also permit — this is their secret gift — the melancholy books, the ones too heavy for the bright half of the year. Sebald in June is an affliction; Sebald in January is company. Winter grants a license: the year itself is grieving, the trees are doing the imagery for you, and a sad book stops being a burden you carry alone and becomes a conversation with the season. I save things for this window deliberately now. The memoir of the friend’s long illness, bought in April: I knew when I bought it that it was a January book, and it is waiting, and the waiting is not avoidance but scheduling — some books need the reader and the world to be in the same weather.
Practical notes from the current well-bottom: this year’s long haul is Kristin Lavransdatter, the Nunnally translation, and medieval Norway turns out to be the correct distance from Rhode Island — far enough to be elsewhere, cold enough to be here. The ghost story rotation is James as always, plus a found anthology of Edwardian oddities of variable quality, the variability being half the charm. And on the melancholy license: Denise Riley, Time Lived, Without Its Flow, an hour long and a season deep. The solstice was Saturday. The light is technically returning, a minute a day, but the well is deepest right now, and I am well provisioned, and I recommend the bottom of the year to anyone who has only ever tried the top. Bring the long book. Leave a lamp on. It’s a dwelling down here, once your eyes adjust.