Strange Things for Love

A book review (with bonus music recommendation)

If you're looking for something quick to round off your reading list for the year or something that you'll keep thinking about long after you finish reading it, something that’s perfect for Advent or Christmas gift giving and equally fitting as the first book of next year, then I have just the book review for you:

As I write from just above the forty-fifth parallel north, midwinter is fast approaching. It’s nearing noon and the sun hasn’t made it yet over the tops of the Douglas firs that line the south pasture. I suspect it won’t today. If all I had to go by was the quality of the light slanting across my desk and picking out the last golden leaves on the branches of the witch hazel outside my window, I’d think it was late afternoon. The goats have grown thick coats. We’re hauling their water, hot, from the laundry sink because the water spigots are wrapped against freezing. The air smells cold.

Here between the Pacific Ocean and the Cascade Range winter is less frigid than in many northern places. But while the weather varies by longitude, for the reader in English literature the season wears a harsh and inhospitable aspect in the mind’s eye: Charles Dickens’s Ebenezer Scrooge huddled over a smoldering fire in his cavernous house, breath smoking in the chill air; Virginia Woolf’s Orlando skating past peasants who chop fruitlessly at the frozen Thames, desperate for water to sustain life; Christina Rosetti’s Christ Child born into a world where the earth itself has turned to ice, too hard even to admit the burial of those who cannot outlast the brutal cold.

All this is conjured by the title before the reader even cracks open the holly-and-ivy-edged cover of Susanna Clarke’s The Wood at Midwinter. . . .

Read the rest here.