After a few days with normal 70-80 degree weather after the brief cold snap, I left the house today to freezing weather. It was only 50 out! I live in Florida. I’m allowed to say it’s freezing when it’s only 50, even when we are warmer than the rest of the country. I don’t own a coat!
Proof
We moved down to Florida in 1993, so, I’ve never really experienced cold weather as an adult, except over the last 4 years. London is not known for much snow, but we did have a bit, and it was exciting for me. I had my nose pressed up to my 4th floor flat window at 11 at night when I saw my first snowfall in almost 20 years, wanting to go outside and play in it, and it wasn’t all that much.
I did have some interesting and pretty walks though to work.
The most fascinating snow experience I had though was during a short trip to Bucharest, Romania, when my husband and I just happened to be there for their National Day parade, an old style Communistic type parade in front of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Palace, or more properly named – Parliamentary Palace.
It was quite unexpected to suddenly see a very familiar site during that parade.
What a way for those American soldiers to spend their Thanksgiving!
But, this has nothing to do with books. The main purpose here was that to honor the freezing weather outside, I pulled a list together of books from my Goodreads list that are set mainly or partly in cold weather.
Let me know if you have any good ones to add, as this list is in no way complete!
One’s I’ve read
Fiction
- A Game of Thrones – George R.R. Martin
- Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
- Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton
- Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
- Gorky Park – Martin Cruz Smith
- Smilla’s Sense of Snow – Peter Høeg
- Snow – Orhan Pamuk
- Snow Falling on Cedars – David Guterson
- Snowdrops – A.D. Miller
- The Call of the Wild – Jack London
- The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – Stieg Larsson
- The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
- The Road – Cormac McCarthy
- The Shipping News – Annie Proulx
- White Fang – Jack London
- Winter’s Bone – Daniel Woodrell
Non-Fiction
- Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors – Piers Paul Read
- Into the Wild – Jon Krakauer
- Race to the Pole: Tragedy, Heroism, and Scott’s Antarctic Quest – Ranulph Fiennes
- Seven Years in Tibet – Heinrich Harrer
- The Snow Leopard – Peter Matthiessen
- The Worst Journey in the World – Apsley Cherry-Garrard
To-Read
Fiction
- A Winter Book – Tove Jansson
- Dark Matter – Michelle Paver
- Dark Winter – William Dietrich
- Forty Words for Sorrow – Giles Blunt
- Independent People – Halldór Laxness
- Laxdæla Saga – Anonymous
- One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
- The Brief History of the Dead – Kevin Brockmeier
- The Colony of Unrequited Dreams – Wayne Johnston
- The Outlander – Gil Adamson
- The People’s Act of Love – James Meek
- This Cold Heaven – Gretel Ehrlich
Non-Fiction (the longest as I have quite a few from National Geographic’s top adventure books on this list)
- Alone: The Classic Polar Adventure – Richard Evelyn Byrd
- Annapurna – Maurice Herzog
- Annapurna: A Woman’s Place – Arlene Blum
- Arctic Dreams – Barry López
- Endurance – Frank Worsley
- Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage – Alfred Lansing
- Everest: The West Ridge – Thomas Hornbein
- Farthest North – Fridtjof Nansen
- Gulag: A History – Anne Applebaum
- In Siberia – Colin Thubron
- In the Land of White Death – Valerian Albanov
- Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster – Jon Krakauer
- Journals: Captain Scott’s Last Expedition – Robeert Faldon Scott
- K2, The Savage Mountain – Charles Houston
- Kabloona: Among the Inuit – Gontran De Poncins
- Minus 148 Degrees – Art Davidson
- My Life as an Explorer – Roald Amundsen
- One Man’s Mountains: Essays and Verses – Tom Patey
- Race to the South Pole – Roald Amundsen
- Scott’s Last Expedition: The Journals – Robert Falcon Scott
- South: The Endurance Expedition – Ernest Shackleton
- Starlight and Storm – Gaston Rébuffat
- Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica – Sara Wheeler
- The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War – David Halberstam
- The Cruelest Miles – Gay Salisbury
- The Crystal Horizon: Everest – The First Solo Ascent – Reinhold Messner
- The Gulag Archipelago 1918 – 1956 – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
- The Home of the Blizzard: A True Story of Antarctic Survival – Douglas Mawson
- The Mountains of My Life – Walter Bonatti
- Touching the Void: The True Story of One Man’s Miraculous Survival – Joe Simpson
- Travels in Siberia – Ian Frazier
- We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance – David Howarth
my year in books 