Hell Will Keep You Warm: What to read this winter

Ah yes, the sun has finally retired. The slight anxiety of longer days can finally be put to rest. The air is cold, all your windows are shut, and you light a candle – It’s 5pm and you have nothing to do. So what do you do? Turn off the TV, put down the phone, and grab a book. It’s time to lose yourself in the pages, and you will likely be amazed by what you find. Below are seven books that are personal favorites of mine. I will warn you, these aren’t “beach reads,” but that is what winter is for!

The Castle – Franz Kafka

Starting off with the strongest, most cold pick of all: Kafka’s The Castle. Kafka creates a world of gray creatures and gray landscapes, underneath the dim longing for a goal that is most indiscernible to the seeker themselves. Our protagonist, K., arrives at a village during the night, and is moderately surprised to hear about the existence of a castle. This castle metaphorically pervades the village, and K. makes it his accidental mission to get into the castle; I say “accidental” here because everything Kafka does in this novel feels like a misstep – a lost wandering. Or as K. thinks, “What questions! What answers! Perhaps he should assure the gentleman that the path on which he had set out on with such hope had led nowhere” (Kafka 104). Through a storyline that becomes less cohesive as the book surges forwards, K. meets these frighteningly funny characters with names such as, The Assistants, Klamm, and Barnabas. The novel was left unfinished by Kafka in 1922, and the ending, quite literally, remains without a period. If you are interested in the strangeness of ourselves, each other, and the hilarity of it all, this book is for you.

M Train – Patti Smith

Smith’s M Train, following the publication of her book Just Kids (about her life and love with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in a 1960’s New York City) is a journey through dreams and reality; how we are, consciously and subconsciously, sifting through them both. Smith is a character of ethereal proportions, with a life that borders on that of a ghost. In M Train we follow her across the world, from an empty café that feels like home to the rocky shore, to the depression that follows an irrevocable loss and a life she doesn’t recognize. All the while we bounce between scenes, scattered notes on napkins, a cowboy with wise parables – Smith consistently stumbling out of the door, pulling on her boots, and trucking from one dreamscape to another. Smith picks up a book, places it back on the shelf, and asks us, “…the many portals of the world. They float through these pages often without explanation. Writers and their process. Writers and their books. I cannot assume the reader will be familiar with them all, but in the end is the reader familiar with me?” (Smith 68).

Coming Into the Country – John McPhee

Goddamn; I love this book. To say it changed my life might be hyperbole, but to a 17-year-old girl who stumbled into it at the Allison B. Goodshell, Rare Books store (if you know, you know) it definitely left an impression. McPhee’s Coming Into the Country is a creative nonfiction account (that began as a series of articles in The New Yorker) of his journey into Alaska in the 1970’s to report on the untouched wilderness that was unfamiliar to most. His journey is breathless, an act of adventure prose that takes us with the grizzlies and the salmon, the hungry winds and storm; down the wild rivers and back again up the mountainous plains. The scenes he encounters will burrow into you, adding to the rich tapestry of your mind; endowing a curiosity about the natural world that you may have forgotten in the daily doldrums of work and life. It’s a true pleasure to delve into this book, and stumble into a world that can feel so distant, and so beautiful.

Edward Hirsch – For the Sleepwalkers

Where do we go when we sleep? Where do we go when we can’t sleep, but we think or wish we were? Hirsch confronts the ambiguousness of nature and its processes in his first book of poems, For the Sleepwalkers. He gnarls language, chews on it, and turns it into tree bark that he rips from limbs and forms into letters; but this process is gentle, passionate, and investigative. It’s a divisive dismembering of reality that leaves us with the essence of things, and their loneliness. In this book of poems, Hirsch gives us a lesson that we have to leave ourselves in order to know ourselves, writing in his ode to the sleepwalkers “We have to learn to trust our hearts like that./ we have to learn the desperate faith of sleep-/walkers who rise out of their calm beds/ and walk through the skin of another life./ We have to drink the stupefying cup of darkness/ and wake up to ourselves, nourished and surprised.” (Hirsch 34).

The Skating Rink – Roberto Bolaño

Bolaño is a master of his craft. While I am specifically enamored with his masterpiece, 2666, it comes in around a cool 900 pages; and what’s more aesthetically relevant to winter than the skating rink? The Skating Rink is a shorter story told by three characters, Remo Morán, Gaspar Heredia, and Enric Rosquelles. Their narratives are interwoven through the character Nuria, a beautiful and prized figure skater who was dropped from the Olympic team. There are many tropes that exist within this story, between characters and plot line; the pining, porky statesman (Enric), the poor, dreaming poet (Gasper), and the suffering novelist (Remo), all within the realms of murder, love, and embezzlement. Yet Bolaño runs with these archetypes in a way that, more or less, says, “Fuck You” – turning predictability into a churning soup of absurdities. It’s a literary world where behavior isn’t defined by x and y, but by darkening hotel rooms, crumpled tents in corner storage rooms, and abandoned mansions.

Desolation Angels – Jack Kerouac

No winter is complete without Kerouac. Many know him for his magnum opus, On the Road, but I want to recommend his Desolation Angels as the perfect book to curl up with. When the world is dull, gray, and cold, there is no better escape than into Kerouac’s dreamscape. With his signature prose that encounters reality like a string of lights illuminating the darkness, flickering as they bump down an endless road, Desolation Angels takes you with him from his isolation on a mountaintop named Desolation Peak in Washington to the depravity of civilization in San Francisco, to a drug-fueled haze in Mexico City, where he bands up with William Burroughs (Bull Hubbard, or “Old Bull”), then on to New York, Paris, and London. Through this book, the reader gets the pleasure, and fear, of seeing the world in its stark realness; a bumbling, blubbering mess of drunk nights, crazy cats, blowing horns, and lost conversations that exist in tandem with the quiet, natural peace that reigns supreme from Kerouac’s immortal mountaintops. There is an ultimate beauty in the between that Kerouac faces, from one extreme to another, we find truth in what we miss; it is in these simple actions where we find the most sweetness, and the most destruction, or as Kerouac writes “And I had raged purely among rocks and snow … Now I’m back in the goddamn movie of the world and now what do I do with it? Sit in fool and be fool, that’s all – The shades come, night falls, the bus roars download – People sleep, people read, people smoke … And they’re all there, my friends, somewhere in those little toystreets, and when they see me the angel’ll they’ll smile – That’s not so bad – Desolation aint so bad…” (Kerouac 129 – 130).

Scary, No Scary – Zachary Schomburg

A friend of mine gave me this book of poetry recently, and it instantly became one of my favorites. Influenced by his neighbor in weirdness, James Tate (who you should give a Google if you don’t know), Schomburg writes a terrifying account of humanity in his second collection of poems. There is a self that is a creature that is divisible, and these divisible parts will not be held accountable when they slump into the woods, under a pile of leaves, and begin eating their way to the center of the Earth. The opening poem, titled after the book, is enough for me. “You’ll return/ to your childhood/ home/ after a lifetime away/ to find it/ abandoned. Its/ red paint will be/ completely weathered./ It will have/ a significant westward lean./ There will be/ a hole in its roof/ that bats fly/ out of./ The old man/ hunched over/ at the front door/ will be prepared/ to give you a tour,/ but first he’ll ask/ scary, or no scary?/ you should say/ no scary” (Schomburg 3). ••

You can find these books at local bookstores such as Symposium Books, Stillwater Books, even Barnes & Noble, or your favorite local used bookstore. I encourage you NOT to order online! Go book hunting – you never know what unexpected treasures you’ll find along the way.

Illustration by Sophie Foulkes.