Toward a reading list for the dark months
By Abby Rabinowitz
When it’s as dark as midnight at 5:15 in the afternoon, it suddenly seems like there’s nothing I want to read.
According to an informal poll of friends, family members, and near-random acquaintances, we’re all trawling bookstore shelves in mild despair, leaving libraries empty-handed, and saying, a little indignantly, “Are novels getting worse? Are we getting pickier?” But maybe the real trouble is the weather. On dreary November afternoons, when we slosh home from the subway through sodden leaves with a feeling of cold misery in our guts, we don’t want to read a good book. We need to read the right book.
Nights when I’m feeling particularly inconsolable, I give up on new books altogether and climb into bed with a cup of hot chocolate to reread Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, which begins with a bed, and a storm, and an awkward girl suffering her own dark night of the soul: “The house shook. Wrapped in her quilt, Meg shook. She wasn’t usually afraid of the weather. — It’s not just the weather, she thought. — It’s the weather on top of everything else. On top of me. On top of Meg Murray doing everything wrong.”
Meg’s total redemption requires a journey through stars and time, during which she meets her true love, regains her lost father, rescues her little brother, defeats evil, and lands safely back in the family vegetable patch, all in 211 pages (or from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. standard reading time). But the first few pages are wonderfully redemptive in their own right: when Meg walks down the stairs to the kitchen, she finds that her little brother is already heating milk for her cocoa.
In the dark months, we need a book that is as consoling as cocoa, or at least a book with a lot of hot drinks. I faithfully read Alexander McCall Smith’s The Sunday Philosophy Club series not for Isabel Dalhousie’s irritating philosophical musings or for the mild mysteries she solves, but because she breaks for tea or coffee every three paragraphs. I may read the latest installment just for its title, “The Comforts of a Muddy Sunday.”
In late fall, I veer away from dense, risky literature with shattered timelines and demanding prose. Instead I seek the comfort of what I think of as “cozy lit,” stories about women who run coffee shops or knitting shops or sunlight-drenched, butter-walled, floor-boarded urban spaces frequented by rich, lonely old widows, quirky aspiring actors, sad but spirited teens, and tough truckers who have a secret fondness for muffins and knitwear. But sometimes I choose unwisely: the last thing I need to do is to launch into a seemingly fine work of cozy lit, like The Friday Night Knitting Club, only to have the main character develop inoperable ovarian cancer forty pages from the conclusion.
Perhaps this is why, lately, all I want read are books from what my sister and I call “the cannon,” which includes the essential books that we read as kids on blustery evenings when the wind blew leaves down into the backyard, and the radiators hissed, and my father sautéed chicken in a wine reduction sauce, and the “Big Chill” soundtrack played on the record player. The cannon includes: later books from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Little House on the Prairie, the eerie Susan Cooper series The Dark is Rising, Michelle Magorian’s Goodnight Mr. Tom, Jean Craighead George’s My Side of the Mountain, Patricia Clapp’s Constance, and a fairytale by James Thurber that no one else seems to know about called The Thirteen Clocks.
This is not to imply that a late fall book should bubble over with unbridled coziness and joy: Little Women must wait for Christmas, when we’re feeling a little less cynical, along with anything by C.S. Lewis, L.M. Montgomery, and Jane Austen. A late fall book can restore warmth and love, but only with the right degree of gloom. If you must have a love story, read one like Sebastian Faulks’s The Girl at the Lion d’Or, which takes place in the dank French countryside in the mid-1930s, or one set on a moor, like just about anything by Daphne de Maurier and the Brontes.
But be warned! It’s far too bleak outside to risk a hardcore post-apocalyptic book like current Barnes and Noble paperback favorites Blindness (which features refuse-smeared psychiatric wards), The Road (cannibalistic tribes), and Never Let Me Go (organ farming).
For now, let us come face to face with evil but never quite topple over the brink. Rather than curse the darkness, let’s light a lamp, wrap ourselves up in a quilt, and read the night away.
Leave us your suggestions for cold-weather friends: what would you add to the reading list?
Abby Rabinowitz is an MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at Columbia University, where she also teaches Undergraduate Writing. Abby has written about sex education, obscure medical conditions, teaching, travel, the wild dogs of Brooklyn and most recently about Sarah Palin’s speech defect for Escobar Magazine.
