I’m one of those people that prefers the cold months to the hot months. I know it’s a hot take, but one of my favorite things to do in the world is to curl up inside warm and cozy while it’s cold and stormy and snow OE outside. I like to curl up with cozy blankets. A good book and just read it’s one of those things I look forward to every year. It just brings me back to my childhood. Makes me feel safe, and makes me feel happy. It’s a great time. And I was realizing there are a few types of books, and there are a few books in particular that I just really associate with these months, and I’d love to share them with you.
The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis
All right, so the first one is a bit of a personal one to me. It’s The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis. It’s one of the books in the Narnia series, probably the most famous of all the books in the Narnia series. And when I think about quintessential winter scenes in all the novels that I’ve read, and I guess the movies that I’ve consumed, because The Blind Witch and the Ward is a great movie, in my opinion. One of the scenes that stands out the most is this scene where Lucy is walking through the magic wardrobe into this wintry forest.
There’s a component of escapism in this book that I think appeals to all audiences.
It’s a book that can be read to younger audiences, but it holds up to older audiences as well. By no means is it a literary masterpiece, but the themes it’s dealing with are also not this kind of simple-minded, just pleasure for the sake of pleasure themes. It’s a more realistic book, so you can kind of choose the level that you want to engage with it. If you want to read it purely for entertainment, it’s an entertaining book. If you want to engage with the themes more deeply, you can also do that. For me, the book reminds me of childhood playing make-belief, playing with your imagination, and I love how the winter evokes that. So if you haven’t read this book, do yourself a service and read it.
Once a Runner by John L. Parker Jr.
If you don’t know, Running is a really big part of my life, and when I think about the emotional role that running plays, it’s a distillation of the process of dreaming. So you set some goals in your future, how fast you want to run a race that you want to win, and then you do all this training to get there. And it’s this very simple task. Put 1ft in front of the other a certain amount of times in a certain amount of time. A very simple, goal-directed task that you can come back to again and again, and there’s no ceiling to it. There’s a book that captures this essence, I think, beautifully, and that’s once a runner. The book is a novel by John L. Parker, Jr. And it’s a story about a runner and in particular, a runner’s path to greatness, running the mile. So there’s a little bit of my personal experience leading out onto this. But it’s also, I think, just this beautiful book about someone pursuing their dreams and doing what it takes to get there while at the same time retaining the very human element.
I have a problem with some novels about pursuing dreams because they get too fantastical, too mystical, and that has value, for sure, but it doesn’t relate so much to my own life. And when I think about the winter, for me, the winter is a time of dreaming. I’m thinking about what I want to do in the upcoming year. And so I want books that make me think like that. And this was absolutely a book that made me think about my own life, the things that I want to do in it, while not discarding the fact that, yeah, I’m a human. I have a life to live outside of these purified, isolated, distilled tasks.
A Little Life by Hania Yanagihara
The next novel that I recommend is one that I just finished. It’s A Little Life by Hania Yanagihara. I hope I got that right. This is a Booker Prize Finalist as a novel. It is a beautiful piece of art. I mean, the prose is fantastic. The structure of the novel, I think, is sound. How it’s broken into parts, and how the chapters alternate. But it still tells a coherent story, even though, temporarily it’s broken up. The frustration that you feel as a result of that is a frustration to know what happens next. Not frustration because you’re confused. That’s a really hard thing to do in a novel you know. Yanagihara does it very well, but that’s kind of the formal appreciation for the novel.
The characters in this novel are just so human. I want to be very clear. This is one of the most tragic books that I’ve ever read. I was deeply sad when reading it. If you read this, you will also be deeply sad. This is just a warning to you. I don’t want you to pick this book up expecting it to be kind of like a happy, fun book. It’s not. What I found, though, when I was reading this book, is that it’s telling a tragic story at a very zoomed-in level. It’s looking at, in particular, essentially, one person and their close friends. It’s looking at this small little life and this tragedy that’s unfolding in this little life throughout time. And it made me look at my own little life and the people around me and recognize how much I appreciate them and how much I appreciate what I have and how lucky I am. And to me, one of the essential things about winter is coming together with people you’re close to, people that you love and appreciate. And so this book, as tragic as it was, made me look at my own life and say, you know what? I appreciate these people. I appreciate what I have. And I think for a novel to do that is a really powerful thing.
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
This next book is one of the longer books. A little life is also a very long thing, like 800-plus pages. This book is the kind of Monte Cristo, and I’ve talked about this in articles in the past, but this is one of my favorite novels of all time. This book is by Alexander Stewart, who is a very famous writer. And what’s interesting about this novel is I’m reading a translation from the original French. So the prose is nothing really special. It’s not super fun to read. The characters, I find they’re interesting, but they’re not that relatable. They’re not that human. I’m not reading for any of those reasons.
I’m reading for the narrative structure, for the arc that the character is going through imprisonment and then redemption and mystery and so on. And I was trying to figure out why this book came into my mind, and I was thinking about when to read, but I was thinking about this theme of imprisonment and dreaming of the future. And what I realized is this is a theme that is dealt with heavily in the book. It was also a theme that we deal with in winter. We’re kind of trapped in our little bubbles. The outside world becomes inhospitable for a while and we have to think about what are we going to do in the next year? And so it’s an exaggeration of this theme, but it’s talking about the same things, and I appreciate the book for that.
How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan
All right, we’re into the only nonfiction book on this list of recommendations. I think about the winter as a fiction time. I couldn’t tell you why. I guess it’s just that, like, cozy, I don’t know, feeling you want to get lost in the story. But this is a book that, when I read it, got me lost in a different type of story, a story of history, true history, and scientific and cultural research. So the book is How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan. It’s a book about psychedelics and how psychedelics might influence mental health care, but more broadly, it’s also a commentary on the culture around psychedelic drugs.
And what I think Poland does an excellent job of is crafting a narrative of the history behind these drugs. Where did they originate from? How did they gain the cultural baggage that they most definitely have today from a legal and criminal perspective and what are we missing in our perception of them today and how could they be useful in the future? Pollan is an excellent writer. I think he does a really good job of breaking down what can be confusing and complicated and to be quite honest, off-putting. And he condenses it all into a very manageable format where you feel like what you’re reading is just someone exploring their curiosities and just digging deeper into these questions.
And I love non-fiction books like that, essentially for the sake of curiosity, not doing this moral grandstanding, not having these strong opinions, getting up on these podiums that they can’t get off of. It’s a book that is curious. It’s about exploring questions and questioning things that you previously believed. And when I read this book for the first time, it sent me down this path of learning about the world of psychedelic research. I read a bunch of books, I took a few courses, and to this day it’s one of my major research interests. And so, thinking about the winter as a time of rebirth, I think, well, what better topic to deal with, first of all, with rebirth than psychedelics and psychedelic culture? But second of all, just the idea of questioning what you believe and being introspective and saying, well, is what I believe accurate? Is it true? And if not, well, what should I believe?
These are all books that I loved, and hopefully, you find one that you can also love this winter, wrapped in blankets, maybe drinking some hot chocolate while it’s snowing outside, something like that.
Anyways, I’ll see you again soon. Bye.
For Reading more Content like this visit Spoting Trends