A big winter book should be full of mood and perhaps some textual difficulty. Reading this particular book might feel a bit ambitious. Maybe you usually don’t read books this long or this demanding. But it’s winter, you don’t have so many other demands on your time and attention. You can tackle a big winter book, promise yourself to it, give yourself over to it.

The hope is that reading your big winter book will be enough of an experience that it will mark out a minor era in your life. You might even later look back and remember, “Oh yeah, that was the year I read that book.”

— Jasper Nighthawk, In Praise of Reading a Big Winter Book, Lightplay, 2025 (via)