Ithaca winters have a specific texture people who haven’t lived through one don’t quite believe when I describe it, not brutally cold most days so much as relentlessly gray, low cloud sitting over the gorges for weeks at a stretch, the lake effect snow that shows up sideways off the lake and doesn’t seem to care what the forecast said. My first winter here I found it grim in a way I wasn’t prepared for. By my third, I’d noticed something about my own reading that I don’t think is a coincidence.

I only reach for the genuinely demanding books, the ones that ask real patience, once the season has actually settled in, late November through March roughly, and I read almost nothing that hard in summer. Always Coming Home, that whole extended patient sit with Le Guin’s invented anthropology, was a February book for me. The Book of the New Sun was a January one. I think it’s because summer here is short and precious and everyone including me wants to be outside using it, and reading something that demands you slow all the way down feels like a waste of daylight you’ll be missing in five months. Winter removes that pressure entirely. There’s nowhere better to be than inside with a hard book once the gorge trails have iced over and going outside means real effort.

There’s a specific evening I keep coming back to when I think about why this pattern exists, an early January night with maybe eight inches already down and more falling sideways past the streetlight outside my window, the kind of snow that makes the whole block go quiet in a way that feels almost engineered for reading. I’d started New Sun that same week and I remember getting three chapters in before I noticed I hadn’t checked the time once, hadn’t thought about anything outside the apartment, hadn’t felt that low hum of guilt I usually get when I’m indoors on a nice day doing something sedentary. The weather had already made the decision for me. There was nothing outside worth trading the book for.

I mentioned this pattern to Ted once and he said his reading doesn’t track the seasons at all, which surprised me, I’d assumed everyone quietly matched their book choices to the weather the way I do without really deciding to. He reads the same mix of things in July that he does in January, no seasonal shift whatsoever, which when I think about it might be because he grew up somewhere with a much milder winter and never had a version of the year get carved this cleanly into an indoor half and an outdoor half. Maybe it’s specific to living somewhere the winter is long enough and gray enough to actually reshape a habit like that.

I mentioned this pattern to Ted once and he said his reading doesn’t track the seasons at all, which surprised me, I’d assumed everyone quietly matched their book choices to the weather the way I do without really deciding to. Maybe it’s specific to living somewhere the winter is long enough and gray enough to actually reshape a habit like that. I’ve stopped fighting it either way. Around November I start a mental list of what’s going to get the hard, patient books this year, and by March, when the light finally starts coming back, I’m usually ready for something faster and easier again, right on schedule, the same way I’m usually ready to be back outside on the gorge trails the exact week the ice finally lets go of them.