15 Books to Read in Winter | Book Recommendations

In which I discuss some of my favorite winter reads. These books don't just have the wintery aesthetic, but they embody the atmosphere, mood, themes, and ideas that people often associate with winter. They're often about isolation and solitude in a cold and unforgiving world. Their prose is often stark, meditative, and reflective.

0:00 Introduction
1:20 James Joyce, The Dead
2:58 Jón Kalman Stefánsson, Heaven and Hell
4:37 Anna Kavan, Ice
6:31 Sjón, The Blue Fox
7:44 Halldór Laxness, Independent People
9:29 Jon Fosse, Septology
11:11 Hanne Ørstavik, Love
12:39 Tarjei Vesaas, The Ice Palace
13:54 Ian McGuire, The North Water
15:27 Karolina Ramqvist, The Bear Woman
17:30 Vladimir Sorokin, The Blizzard
18:51 Kristín Eiríksdóttir, A Fist or a Heart
19:50 Kristín Marja Baldursdóttir, Karitas, Untitled
21:28 Ófeigur Sigurðsson, Öræfi
23:19 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Reviews mentioned:

Books discussed with affiliate links to editions shown:

Correction: I said that Öræfi won the Nordic Council Literature Prize, but it did not. I had it mixed up in my head with his other novel Jón, which famously was the first Icelandic novel to win the European Union Prize for Literature. Öræfi did win the major literary prizes in Iceland though, namely the Icelandic Literature Prize and the Book Merchant's Prize. Are there too many literary prizes? Yes, but also no.

(This video was just an excuse to talk about modern Icelandic and Norwegian literature.)

#bookreview #bookrecommendations #nordicliterature #icelandicliterature #norwegianliterature #books

[martyjoebarry]

your channel is so good and so underrated. i can’t wait to see you blow up

[jorgem]

The Ice Palace is one of my favorite books. I read it for a literature class, but the book has stayed with me. It is amazing.

[ledaswan]

Thanks so much. I can’t wait to read some of these authors

[andyschubert]

My interest in Laxness brought me here earlier this year. This is a great and insightful channel and I highly appreciate your efforts and dedication. Thank you very much and Season's Greetings from a not so wintry Switzerland😀

[gevisu]

The Blizzard was fantastic. Read Osebol recently aswell, that was also great. Thanks for the recommendations!

[kieran_forster_artist]

Thanks again Sean….you are a great guide to reading choices, and I appreciate the candid style and contextualisation, especially including paintings

[morbidswither]

This was a highly engaging and sublime post. I loved the particular thematic unity of this list, and its tangibility.

[mentallicsansar]

I just want to mention one more short story/novella named THE COUNTRY DOCTOR by Franz Kafka. The thing I loved in that is that the depiction of coldness as not only the weather or physical environment but also the emotional coldness, as everyone in that story seems to be isolated or indifferent from there surroundings. I don't think I am able to describe clearly but yeah, the story could be a good one to read in Winter.

[EricKarlAnderson]

Nice winter sweater! ❄ Kafka at the DMV! 🤣 I like to read Hemingway while sorting my recycling.
Great suggestions! 📚 'The Dead' is really a perfect, beautifully written short story - especially for winter, as you say. Great quote!
I just heard about someone else talking about Kavan's novel recently and I'm so eager to read it.
There aren't any particular books I read during the first snowfall, but I think that's a lovely tradition. I love Sjon's "Moonstone".

Orstavik's "Love" haunts me. Brilliant novel! And "The North Water" is incredible - though I've not read "Blood Meridian" so wasn't bothered by any evident influence.
Thanks so much for speaking so eloquently about some favourites and introducing me to some others I need to read. I'd like to recommend to you the short story collection "London Under Snow" by the Spanish author Jordi Llavina (translated by Douglas Shuttle) which are all set during winter and which probe issues to do with memory and loss so beautifully.

[SpringboardThought]

Oooo and my Septology did finally just arrive… tempting ~~ great stuff!

[kiranreader]

i agree - septology is such a perfect winter read. ideal for the last week of the year!!! def gonna have to check out the rest of the books you recommended :)

[michaelrhodes]

It’s Summer-time in Antarctica.

“As the newspapers told, we sailed from Boston Harbour on September 2, 1930; taking a leisurely course down the coast and through the Panama Canal, and stopping at Samoa and Hobart, Tasmania, at which latter place we took on final supplies. None of our exploring party had ever been in the polar regions before, hence we all relied greatly on our ship captains—J. B. Douglas, commanding the brig Arkham, and serving as commander of the sea party, and Georg Thorfinnssen, commanding the barque Miskatonic—both veteran whalers in Antarctic waters. As we left the inhabited world behind the sun sank lower and lower in the north, and stayed longer and longer above the horizon each day. At about 62° South Latitude we sighted our first icebergs—table-like objects with vertical sides—and just before reaching the Antarctic Circle, which we crossed on October 20 with appropriately quaint ceremonies, we were considerably troubled with field ice. The falling temperature bothered me considerably after our long voyage through the tropics, but I tried to brace up for the worse rigours to come. On many occasions the curious atmospheric effects enchanted me vastly; these including a strikingly vivid mirage—the first I had ever seen—in which distant bergs became the battlements of unimaginable cosmic castles.

Pushing through the ice, which was fortunately neither extensive nor thickly packed, we regained open water at South Latitude 67°, East Longitude 175°. On the morning of October 26 a strong “land blink” appeared on the south, and before noon we all felt a thrill of excitement at beholding a vast, lofty, and snow-clad mountain chain which opened out and covered the whole vista ahead. At last we had encountered an outpost of the great unknown continent and its cryptic world of frozen death. These peaks were obviously the Admiralty Range discovered by Ross, and it would now be our task to round Cape Adare and sail down the east coast of Victoria Land to our contemplated base on the shore of McMurdo Sound at the foot of the volcano Erebus in South Latitude 77° 9′.

The last lap of the voyage was vivid and fancy-stirring, great barren peaks of mystery looming up constantly against the west as the low northern sun of noon or the still lower horizon-grazing southern sun of midnight poured its hazy reddish rays over the white snow, bluish ice and water lanes, and black bits of exposed granite slope. Through the desolate summits swept raging intermittent gusts of the terrible Antarctic wind; whose cadences sometimes held vague suggestions of a wild and half-sentient musical piping, with notes extending over a wide range, and which for some subconscious mnemonic reason seemed to me disquieting and even dimly terrible. Something about the scene reminded me of the strange and disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich, and of the still stranger and more disturbing descriptions of the evilly fabled plateau of Leng which occur in the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. I was rather sorry, later on, that I had ever looked into that monstrous book at the college library.

On the seventh of November, sight of the westward range having been temporarily lost, we passed Franklin Island; and the next day descried the cones of Mts. Erebus and Terror on Ross Island ahead, with the long line of the Parry Mountains beyond. There now stretched off to the east the low, white line of the great ice barrier; rising perpendicularly to a height of 200 feet like the rocky cliffs of Quebec, and marking the end of southward navigation. In the afternoon we entered McMurdo Sound and stood off the coast in the lee of smoking Mt. Erebus. The scoriac peak towered up some 12, 700 feet against the eastern sky, like a Japanese print of the sacred Fujiyama; while beyond it rose the white, ghost-like height of Mt. Terror, 10, 900 feet in altitude, and now extinct as a volcano. Puffs of smoke from Erebus came intermittently, and one of the graduate assistants—a brilliant young fellow named Danforth—pointed out what looked like lava on the snowy slope; remarking that this mountain, discovered in 1840, had undoubtedly been the source of Poe’s image when he wrote seven years later of:

—the lavas that restlessly roll
Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek
In the ultimate climes of the pole—
That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek
In the realms of the boreal pole.”

-H.P. Lovecraft

[jorvikreads]

This is such a great list - so many books added to my TBR. I've always been intimidated by Joyce but you've more than convinced me to pick up Dubliners.

[AfloatThePages]

Thank you for all of these recommendations. I'm especially excited to read Heaven and Hell & The Ice Palace. Now I also have to check out Öræfi... you had me at the intersection of etymology, topography, & mythology!

[maddssmithy]

I just put the majority of these books on my to read list! These all sound great! Love your videos

[shelf-regulatingsystem]

Great video, appreciate your approach to this kind of thematically associative list. Best wishes from a warm room in dark, wintery Dublin.

[KatiaFdez]

Loved this list!! I’m also a very mood reader and like to read precisely this kind of books during winter! I have Normal people and Heaven and Hell ready to read during this Christmas holidays thanks to your recommendations!! Also loved Ice and the Ice palace and the dead. Thank you!! Love your channel!! Happy winter ❄️❄️

[neonvalleystreets]

Thanks for another great video! The TBR keeps growing 😅

[XX-nmkv]

I'm going to pick up a copy of LOVE on my lunch break. Great recommendations, per usual.

[thegenesis]

Great list and 15 new books to add to my tbr 😅!
I'll be reading Knausgaard's a time for everything this Christmas.