Greetings from Snowy Michigan.
I’ve capitalized the S in snowy as I firmly believe Snowy Michigan is a real, solid place and thus worthy of being a proper noun. For the record, Snowy Michigan is geographically the same as Sunny Michigan, but it has an other-worldly dimensionality to it where the grey and gloom are overpowering. If you know, you know.
One of my colleagues says that when winter rolls around, he reads the Russians. He pulls Tolstoy, Chekov, and Dostoevsky off his shelf and he wallows in the oppressive cold and misery. He is not an unhappy person, but he finds that spending time with people whose lives are so bad, he finds that getting through another mid-western winter, (he left Michigan for “sunny” Nebraska) requires him to see how much worse it can be. It is sound logic. No matter how bad you feel, it can be worse and one simply needs to spend some time in the Russian tundra to realize that you don’t really understand the cold. You’ll be fine.
I will admit that as a young person, I read Jack London in the winter. “To Build a Fire” is so brilliant and it reminds us that Mother Nature is undefeated. To that end, I submit that it is in our best interest to start a new tradition. Instead of pulling out our mental snow brushes and tire chains, we cast off the shackles of dourness and we spend the winter doing beach reads. Fun, fast-paced books that make us happy, or keep us up at night reading, or whatever you think qualifies as a beach read.
Why wait until you are sitting on a beach in the sun, to spend time reading about exotic locals and high adventure? Who says that saucy new romantasy novel needs to remain shelved until the snow melts? Maybe that is just what you need to melt that mental snow? What is stopping you from reading about a globetrotting adventure? The weather can’t stop books and it certainly can’t freeze your imagination.
We love books because they transport us. We want to read because stories can take us anywhere, and anywhen we want to be. So let’s make a pact right here, right now, that the next book we open will warm us up! Let’s trot the globe and save the world and solve the mystery and fall in love. I’m not saying that we should never read the Russians again, but maybe, we can just wait until the sun sets at 10 instead of 5, to stand with Anna on that train platform.
Let me know what book you would pick that would brighten your cold, wintery day. What makes it melt your snow?
Notes from my bookshelf
I will share some of my recent non-doom and gloom reads here. Parisa Akhbari’s Just Another Epic Love Poem is just a delight. High school. Drama. Love poems. Triumph!
Liane Moriarty is back and her latest book Here One Moment has all the twists and turns that one expects from her. Plus, it takes place in Australia, so the heat is always on.
I reread Becky Chambers’ Monk and Robot books for an appearance on Jess B. Davies’ Literature for Life show on the Femme On podcast network. Seriously, these books are guaranteed heartwarmers.
Notes from my keyboard
I had a talk with my publisher last week and she told me that Universal Truth is almost ready for pre-sale. It comes out in October, and so, for you, my loyal readers, I want you to be the first to get a sneak peek at the cover. I think it looks amazing!
