Winter vacation
Three books that will take you on solo, chilly trips.
It’s holiday season, and I have decked boughs with the two great literary references above, but also the two great literary references below.
I love winter, and I look forward to a little time off work so I can walk around my neighborhood when it’s eerily quiet, listening to some wintry classical, my eyes tearing up like an idiot, willing it to snow.
These three books, while not about snow per se, are spare, chilly, and have that waiting-for-snow smell. They also require you to stretch your mind a little, like winter classical.
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♎ Intimacies
Katie Kitamura, 2021
It’s the Hague, and the narrator—who, now that I think of it, doesn’t get named, much like the narrator in Rebecca (see Bleak houses)—has the very complicated job of translator. I liked this book so much, because it’s well written, obviously, which is why it’s showing up in EELS, but also because the title tips you off to what you’re looking for throughout: the intimacies we establish with each other, for better or for worse.
She’s got a lot going on in her personal and professional lives in both mundane and profound ways. There’s a burgeoning relationship (that’s an intimacy), an old and new friendship (two more), a very unsettling task at work (a big unwelcome intimacy there), and a lot of other intimacies to observe. Throughout it all, things feel chilly and odd, as if August Blue (see Little books, lotta steps) had been put through the looking glass.
Recommended for: Those who want to escape to Europe but in a way that makes them think a little.
Want to see what books I’ve recommended in the past? I have a spreadsheet of all my recommended books so you don’t have to go hunting, and if you’re an EELS subscriber, I’ll give you access to it. It’s free, it’s easy, maybe it’ll help! (Sometimes I even remember to keep it up to date!)
🐐 The Sunlit Night
Rebecca Dinerstein Knight, 2015
OK here we go. This is a little more of a true escape to Europe. An aspiring painter named Frances is trying to get the heck away from New York and a little family drama by accepting a barn-painting gig in Norway, where, being summer, the sun never really sets and the Scandinavian culture never really stops shocking.
Also, there’s another New Yorker, a Brooklynite named Yasha who is trying to bury his Russian grandfather’s ashes at the “top of the world.” Frances and Yasha are really trying to shed some baggage in this isolated place of wooly animals and rocks, and it is thrilling to spy on them as they do so.
I was so into this book, and think about it often! There’s an amazing, quiet scene involving Norse mythology stuff (see Mything in action), and now I have a deep need to visit the area. Goats! Grass! I can hear and smell them!
Recommended for: Those who want to wear a thick sweater and gaze upon a fjord, wondering what it means to “find themselves” but then realizing that maybe, maybe, they already have.
🏔️ Disappearing Earth
Julia Phillips, 2019
Just a real handful of trigger alerts for this one: Children are in danger. A lot of danger.
Set on the impossibly remote peninsula of Siberia called Kamchatka, Disappearing Earth is not messing around. It is going to lay out for you a cold, brutal, eerily beautiful scene that contains some really messed up sad truths underneath. It begins with two little sisters walking around by themselves on a stony beach. If you’re thinking “that sounds ominous” you are correct. The rest of the book is consumed with the fallout of the thing that happens to them, and the stories of other women as the ripples of those consequences spread into the native communities around the region.
Those ripples and those stories are really heartbreaking, I am not going to lie to you. Be prepared for that—women don’t have it easy anywhere, and particularly not here—but the richness of detail about the surrounding area and its many cultures, landscapes, and history is like this whole other icy tapestry.
Recommended for: Those who can brace themselves for a cold slap in the face because they know a walk through a green forest is around here somewhere.
Recommended format: Audiobook. I adored the narrator, who did children’s voices perfectly, which you don’t find often.
And now, a bonus recommendation
All the Lovers in the Night — Mieko Kawakami, 2011
“The protagonist, Fuyuko, is a freelance copy editor living in Tokyo, and the book perfectly encapsulates the agony of the job (though I have not worked full-time as an editor myself, I can still relate). Like, there’s a scene where she discovers a ‘glaring error’ in a novel she proofread, despite ‘having checked every single line multiple times.’ She vows to stop going into bookstores afterward, unless it’s absolutely necessary, so as to avoid such discoveries.
The book’s about more than being a copy editor, though! It’s also about loneliness, alcoholism, womanhood, working through trauma, etc. The dialogue is rich, as is the story. I couldn’t put it down.”
Recommended by: Courtney, who is a really good reporter and also a really good book recommender. The last three books she loved were Hamnet, The House of Mirth, and Weather.
That was the thirtieth EELS! I would be just so grateful if you’d share widely with your networks! As always, send any and all questions, feedback, and shouted book recommendations by hitting reply.
📚 Susan
I need to have less Christmas ornaments and also I need those P&P ornaments.