Well, hello and Happy National Book Day to you! In celebration, this post contains a lot of lists of books for every mood (including Fractious in an Apparently Unending Heatwave). It also contains talk of poetry – well, a poem – and a possible epiphany, so consider yourselves warned.
We begin with a photo of Good Cat not getting in the way of me reading on the sofa, unlike last week’s photo of Bad Cat doing precisely that.
Books For When You Are Fractious In an Apparently Unending Heatwave
God, I hate the heat. I hate the sun. I hate the inescapably oppressive nature of it, I hate the clothes and shoes I have to wear (I’m a cardigan maximalist and sandals make me cry), I hate what it does to my skin, to the garden, to the country. I hate what it says about the state of the climate crisis and how thoroughly it brings home our powerlessness to arrest either it or the people who are causing most of it. It’s about 90 clearly identifiable very rich men at this point.
Days over 25 degrees Celsius are, ironically, dark days.
All we can do is retreat from them into books that offer literally wintry solace. Books like:
1. The Long Winter
The sixth book in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series does exactly what it says on the tin. The family is trapped by months of unrelenting blizzards in the legendary winter of 1880-81 in the Dakota Territory. God, it’s long. God, they’re cold. God, it’s exactly what we need right now. It will make you forget you were ever hot, let alone sweaty.
2. Giants In the Earth by Ole Edvart Rolvaag
I haven’t read this one but am off to buy it as soon as I leave here because apparently the author was a Norwegian pioneer who settled in the same territory just in time to endure the same winter and this is his account of it. How have I missed this?! I cannot wait to read it.
3. The Wall by Marlen Haushofer
Woman goes walking with her cousin and his wife in the Austrian mountains. They go missing. She goes looking for them. She finds a transparent wall cutting her off from the rest of the world, beyond which life seems to have ended. Cue survivalism, isolation, questions about what it means to be human when there is no one around to keep you so, but most importantly for our purposes – mountainous chill. It is the heat-intolerant introvert’s dream and thus I suspect speaks to all of us. Maybe I’m wrong! I know there are gregarious readers out there. But I just cannot imagine a sunbathing bookworm. It seems so wrong. Also, the image it conjures is literally of worms being broiled by the sun. Unhappy thought.
4, 5, 6 The Woods in Winter and The Snow-Woman by Stella Gibbons and A Winter Away by Elizabeth Fair.
These are all available from the wonderful Dean Street Press (basically, if you have worked your way through all of Persephone Books, this should be your very next stop.
I have not read any of them but would buy them for the gorgeous, icy covers alone. Also, you simply cannot go wrong with Stella Gibbons, even outside Cold Comfort Farm.
7. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken
The first book in the Wolves Chronicles (aka Dido Twite’s adventures, though that inimitable heroine doesn’t actually appear in the opening volume). Cousins Sylvia and Bonnie inhabit an alternative nineteenth century England, during the fictional reign of King James III. Wolves have returned to the country via the new channel tunnel and add an extra element of peril to the girls’ situation once it appears that Bonnie’s parents have died abroad and they are at the mercy of their terrible governess Miss Slighcarp. She sends them away to a brutal orphanage/workhouse from which they are rescued by Simon the Goose Boy and can begin to plot their revenge.
All this takes place in the dead of winter, and contains the greatest scene in all of literature – when the children have to bed down in a cartful of sleepy geese to escape, surrounded by warmth and softness and safety. Any traumas you are wrestling with – this will cure you.
8. Gawain and the Green Knight
Nothing’s colder than a medieval chivalric romance set at Christmas time. Castles, feasting, journeying through forests, winter hunting – gorgeous. Read Simon Armitage’s translation but do also have a look here at the original. XXXX introduced me to metseditions.org which was set up in 1990 to offer glossed versions of Middle English texts that are free to access (this stuff is usually restricted to pretty expensive specialist books or academic sites that require subscriptions) and is just an incredible help and delight. It relies on donations, so if you do find yourself revelling in its treasure, try to bung them a few quid.
9. Russka by Edward Rutherfurd
A novel about the history of Russia. It was even colder in the past than it is now. The book is nearly 1000 pages long. Get in and freeze.
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