Books to Read in Winter

hi everyone i'm miranda and welcome to my youtube channel today i'm talking about some brilliant books to read in the winter it's quite appropriate for me to be talking about these books right now because just outside my bedroom window there is snow on the ground and it's been quite a chilly weekend so this is definitely the time to curl up with a good wintry read i always love reading in tune with the season i've been enjoying some snowy books myself so far this month and i'm really looking forward to sharing my suggestions with you all as well as a few books that are on my 2b red pile that i'm hoping to get to before the end of the winter last winter i did a video on great books to read during the colder months so i'll link that video in the description box down below if you'd like to have more of my suggestions for wintry reads too but let's get started with this big stack here i recently read a winter away by elizabeth fair and i so enjoyed it it was the perfect cozy winter weekend read it really was such a fun one i love this edition by the publisher dean street press i think it's so attractive with the eric revilius artwork on the cover elizabeth faire is a new to me writer all of her books are set mainly i think in the 1950s perhaps a few in the early 60s but a lot in the 1950s and that's a time period that i always enjoy reading about she wrote six novels and this is one of them now i want to read all of the other ones because they really fight they're really fun um good humored books a bit in the style of angela tharkl and her sense of humor reminds me of jane austen or barbara pym it's a very british very wry sense of humor but i really enjoy that about her writing a winter away is about a young girl called maude who goes to stay with her cousin who she calls sort of aunt alice and on alice's companion who doesn't particularly welcome ward and views who is rather an intruder on on their home but maude gets a job working as secretary to old m as he is known as elderly gentleman who owns a large but disintegrating country house mould falls in love with this house and she really gets on with old um too much to her credit because he's rather difficult and very eccentric and really rather a miser but she helps him to write his letters and tackles the library which is a complete mess filled with books that oldham has picked up in auctions or that have been left to him in wills and he's never sorted it out and as she works for old em maude meets both his estranged nephew and old m son and she's in turns intrigued and also slightly repelled by both of them but there's so much humor in this about the members of the village all the sort of local gossip going on and some of the incidents that happen and more to herself i find a really lovable heroine she reminds me a little bit of flora post from cold comfort farm or emma woodhouse in that she does rather like to manage other people a bit but she often doesn't realize what her own emotions really are or quite what's going on and that was just a really fun part of the book too but yes this was a lovely read and a good winter one because it's all set during the winter there's some very funny little sherry parties that they have around christmas that are far too mean on the sherry but it's just a really good book and interesting actually with all that sort of post-war world war ii rationing that was taking place and the cottage that walt lives in is always freezing cold so there's a lot about being cold as well as a bit hungry in this book but a really entertaining one and then this is always a favorite of mine jamaica in by daphne du maurier and this is such a good wintry read it actually starts out in november it's one of her historical books that daphne du maurier wrote and it's full of excitement it's about a young girl who again is sent to stay with her aunt at jamaica inn which is an inn sort of buried on the malls of cornwall and her aunt is a very timid woman who's married to a real bully of a man and what becomes clear is that the inn is in fa is in fact a front for violence and murder and smuggling and this gang of criminals essentially run by mary's uncle and there is a bit of romance here and that she gets drawn to her uncle's brother but she doesn't know whether she can trust his brother or not what side he's really on how black his heart really is and so it's quite a suspenseful thriller this book i really enjoyed it some of it is a tad on the melodramatic side but it's just a sort of book that will keep you completely engrossed turning the pages by the fire so again it's a very good cold weather read there are some dramatic scenes in this where the weather really features so i highly recommend this one and then this is a book i really enjoyed reading last summer actually it's the black birder by dorothy b hughes and i was even though i really enjoyed the book i was a bit annoyed that i was reading it in the summer because actually it's a brilliant winter book which i hadn't realized it would be but this is set during world war world war ii it's set in america and it's about a young woman who had become involved in the french resistance but then fled france to the states but she knows that the gestapo are on her trail and she thinks she's been spotted in new york city and a man ends up being killed right outside her road so she's got both the police and the gestapo after her so she's a woman on the run and she's also trying to find her fiance she's not sure what has happened to him so she decides to try to flee to new mexico where she's heard a mysterious figure called the black birder can smuggle people out of the us into mexico so she wants to make her escape i know to see if she can find any news of her fiance it's a really thrilling book i mean i was completely gripped from the first page and the new mexico setting is so dramatic so atmospheric of course it gets so cold there in the winter and there are amazing blizzard scenes and she has to be on the run trying to flee in a car and on foot through the snow and everything hiding out in an abandoned house and being so cold so again the weather really plays a vital role in this story and it adds to its drama and its suspense as well and i highly recommend this it was such an engrossing and gripping read featuring a wonderful heroine who sorts everything out for herself you know there's no being rescued by a man really in this she shows herself to be just so gutsy i really really enjoyed that about this story and the ending is satisfying but also a little ambiguous which i enjoyed too so yeah a really great read for winter that one and then this book the glove maker by anne weissgarber i'm not sure if that's how you say her last name but this is a really good book to read in the winter and in january and february in particular because the book is mainly set in those months of the year this is an historical book it's set in utah in the 1880s and this was again such a brilliant page turner i really raced through this one and read it very quickly it's about a woman who's a glove maker she makes her own gloves cuts them all out out of leather and she is in her small home in utah and quite an isolated closed off community and she's waiting at home for her husband to return her husband is a wheel maker who goes off traveling to earn money mending the wheels of wagons and so on and her her husband is meant to have returned several weeks ago but he still hasn't and she's just beginning to grow anxious then one evening a man taps at her door seeking refuge he's a mormon who's being chased by um lawmakers and he's on the run and she is a mormon herself and she helps to shield him knowing that this will put her into great danger he only stays one night and then he leaves the next day however she knows that there are going to be men on the hunt for this man and there's a really vivid scene where she realizes that he has left tracks in this freshly fallen snow and that no other snow is coming so these tracks won't be covered up and so if men come looking it will be very easy for them to see the tracks made by a man and his horse and leading to her stable and so on so she's got to try and cover up these tracks which she does with a sort of sledge and oh but it's just she's really on this race against the clock so it's really dramatic and your heart sort of pounds along with her in this book there's a bit of a romance in this story too which is unexpected but i found quite satisfying but really it's just a very gripping read and yeah i really recommend it to such a good cold weather book and then this has been a book that i've enjoyed reading this winter it's the diabolical bones by bella ellis it's the second book in the bronte mystery series that she's writing where she imagines the bronte sisters as these sort of lady detectives that end up solving mysteries that they come across um in yorkshire and i really enjoy them i mean you do have to suspend your disbelief obviously a bit to sort of enter into this world where the bronte sisters could have banded together as detectives but once you've got past that they're actually really fun and you can tell that they're very well researched um bella ellis has written a lot of detail historic detail into the stories too about the brontes and also about their brother which is really interesting so i think any fan of the brontes would enjoy um these books this is the one that's really set at winter time and bella ellis is so good at describing what winter would have been like for them so cold so brutal really in many ways and the mystery as well is quite intriguing in this it's all just really well done and makes quite a good cold weather read again so especially as i'm living in yorkshire i think i really enjoyed reading this one and then one of my favorite agatha christie books to read in the winter is called the sitterfoot mystery and i don't actually have a physical copy of this book which is a shame because it's one of my favorites but a lot of the agatha christie's i have to say i only have on kindle or i listen to them on audible because there are just so many of them although they have so much shelf space so this is one that i just have on kindle but i really recommend it again it's one book where the weather the snow in particular plays a really vital role it's set in devon and it's a really good country house type mystery it's the mystery sort of starts out one evening where there's a gathering around an ouija board in the country house and it seems like a spirit has spelt out murder but it's a classic agatha christie book and it features very likeable heroine as well in this one this is a standalone one it's not an urchill parole miss marple or anything like that but it's a really fun read great one for winter so one that i like to return to always in the winter time i like to listen to this one a lot on audible and then a few children's ones to recommend for winter this one i read recently and i absolutely adored it it's called the ship from seminole street by jenny overton if you watched my videos on books i recommended for christmas then you'll know that i recommended the 13 days of christmas by jenny overton that's one of my favorite christmas reads but i recently read this book by her and i absolutely adored it this is for an older audience it's more of a why a book and adults can really enjoy this one too it's such a slight book that you can read it in an evening and it's well worth it now this takes place all sort of through a year but there are some wonderful wintry scenes in this book and because so much of the action takes place around a bakery it just seems like such a good wintry kind of read because they always talk about how warm the bakery is and they're always baking such delicious things and that just seems to pair very well with wintertime for me so i really enjoyed reading this one just the other week it's set in regency times during the napoleonic wars in fact and it's about two sisters who are brought up in um well near a bakery their father is a baker in town and his banks are very well established he's become quite prosperous and their mother is rather proud and insists upon having a newly built house and she wants her daughters to marry well she has her eye on the local bankers son for polly the eldest daughter but polly's heart becomes captured by a soldier who was sent off to fight in spain and she ends up running off after him she dresses as a male clerk gets on board a ship and sets off to spain to try to find him and what the story is really about is her sister who's left behind father goes off in search of polly and her sister stays behind and starts to really help running the bakery while her father is no longer at the helm and i love this book because like i said it takes you through the year through so many old celebrations and country customs and the traditional bakes that they had at certain times of year like the special cakes they make for candlemas day for instance the simnel cakes they make for easter special breads that they make for harvest festivals and so on and i loved that about this book because i'm so interested in reading about old country customs like that and country recipes that you don't really come across anymore and the historical detail in this book is marvelous i mean i think jenny overton it's a shame she wrote so few books because she researched her books so well they're so interesting because of the historical detail she also includes a lot of old folk songs in this book too which i absolutely love and she just gives you a real feeling for what small town life would have been like in those days and how much of the bakery would have been such an integral integral part of the town life and she even describes for instance how with the 13 baker's dozen they would never accept any money for that 13th loaf and those lows were given out to the poor every morning and just little details like that that i found so fascinating and satisfying so i really love this and there's a wonderful bit too with the mum who feels really guilty decides that as a grand gesture they're going to bake a wedding cake special plum cake for every member of the battalion of sort of polly's um new husbands battalion and they send off a thousand and two hundred cakes for polly in the hope that they'll find her and it's all about how they bake all these cakes and hired their own ship to send them yeah it's a really sweet story um there's a lovely ending to it as well so one i highly recommend and then this is a book that i recently read too and i actually wish that i'd come across this book when i was a child because i would have absolutely adored it i still love reading it now but i just know this would have really captured my imagination when i was little it's called the snow storm it's by barrel nether netherclift and it's about two twin sisters and their younger brother who again are sent off to stay with an aunt and their aunt lives in a lovely english country manor house but she's finding it increasingly difficult to run the house and to keep it up she's always short of money and the children try to find ways they can help that aunt to raise money for the house and to return it back to the glorious state that it used to be in but they can't find a way to save the house but one day they discover this beautiful snow globe in the library and they shake the globe and they find that it actually has magical properties in that it can transport the children back in time and they end up meeting a young boy who used to live in the house they meet other former occupants of the house who are also their ancestors and they learn all of these secrets about the house that enable them to end up saving the house and restoring the family's fortunes it's a really charming book there are some lovely descriptions of lavish teas which i especially enjoyed it's mainly all set in january so it was a great january read there's a dramatic snowstorm in this there's just so much to enjoy in this story i always like a time slip children's story too so i loved that aspect of the book as well but yes a really charming read i think this was published as the snow ghosts in the states so if you're having trouble finding it under the english title the snowstorm then know that the snow ghosts is the same book i believe and then another book that i read over well just recently actually earlier in january is cut off from crumpets by margaret j baker this is the follow-up book to cast away christmas which i also spoke about in my previous videos and i absolutely loved reading this sequel castaway christmas was all about the ridley family which is two sisters and a brother um getting cut off from their parents by accident they end up staying in this country house at christmas with flood waters rising well in this book it's snow that's the problem and they get this time they are with their parents but they're cut off from crumpets cut off from everything really by a snow storm and it's about how they unite as a family to overcome all of the obstacles that that snowstorm brings like frozen pipes like neighbors in trouble there's just so much to enjoy in this book it's a really heartwarming read and i was so thrilled to get this one and then always a favorite winter read for me a real classic is little women by louisa may alcott of course this book famously starts at christmas time but there are other famous scenes i love from it like the ice skating scene where amy falls through the ice and yes there's just so many wintry moments in this book that really stick in my mind so it's one that i love to read at winter it's just always such a magical book and the perfect one to come up with by the fireside similarly i love to read white boots or this is known as skating shoes in america by noel stratfield i love her book ballet shoes that's one of my favorites that book is of course all about ballet and white boots is all about ice skating and it's about a young girl whose family don't have very much money so she finds it very difficult even to buy her own pair of skating shoes and to have skating lessons but she has so much natural talent paired with a very strong work ethic and i love that about noel streckfield's books is that she always talks about the importance not only of natural talent but how that on its own isn't enough you have to pair that with being a hard worker and taking your performance and your growing your own skills really seriously and in this there's a friendship that turns into a bit of a rivalry um because another girl in the story who has so much money and all natural advantages she has a lot of natural talent however she doesn't work very hard and her heart in the end isn't really in ice skating as much in the end this ultimately is a story about female friendship too as well as female ambition and i really enjoy that about this book and it is a heartwarming read so always one i like to return to as well a few non-fiction choices now i've mentioned wintering a lot on here i feel so i won't say too much about it but it was definitely one of my favorite books of 2020 it's a brilliant memoir in this book catherine may looks at the lessons that you can learn from nature and how natural how the natural world essentially survives winter and she looks at nature in terms of how it can inspire her own life and her own periods of despondency of wintering essentially when her life doesn't go as well as she maybe would want it to and i think we can all relate to that feeling we can all relate to so much of what katherine may writes about in this book but in some ways this is also a real love letter to winter catherine may loves that season and she also writes about some of the books for instance that she loves to read at christmas time and in the winter what she loves about the cold as well and how coal can actually be good for you in many ways too they're wonderful descriptions of her swimming in the sea all through the year and how that really trained her not only to be more resilient in so many different ways but also in a love of the cold too so yeah this is a brilliant book to read at this time of year this is another memoir called paris in winter an illustrated memoir by david coggins and david coggins is a wonderful illustrator as well as writer and these years cover i think 1997 yeah 1997 right up to 2010 where he and his wife and children would go and spend every new years in paris and have a few weeks in paris in january so this is a really good january read as well and if you love paris then i'm sure you'd appreciate this book there are beautiful illustrations of paris there are wonderful reminiscences of amazing french food french meals that they ate in parisian restaurants there's just so much to enjoy in this book if you're a bit of a francophone which i definitely am so this is a lovely winter read too and then i absolutely adore this cookbook it's called sugared orange recipes and stories from a winter in poland by bieter satsawska sorry i'm sure i've mispronounced that but it's a wonderful look back to the author's childhood which was spent in rural poland and of the family recipes that she continues to make as well as all of the memories that she has from that idyllic time in her life there's so many family stories about what her grandmother cooked for instance in here that's really charming lots of delicious recipes that i really want to make but there's the photography is also amazing so many sort of glorious wintry scenes all through poland both in the cities and in the countryside and the amazing forests and it's just such a delight to flick through this book and look at the amazing photography as well as be inspired by what you might want to try making and yes it's just a glorious celebration of winter as well as of good eating and childhood and family and of course of poland itself too it definitely makes me want to visit poland when i look at this book there are just so many beautiful scenes and yes i love the way it's all laid out and designed and it makes it the sort of cookbook that you just want to read as well as to cook from which is my favorite type so i absolutely love this one and then i also wanted to chat about some of the books on my to be read pile for winter so let me just replenish my stack okay back again with more books so these books are ones i would love to get to this month or in february i'm not sure if i'll be able to because i'm having to do a lot of reading at the moment actually for a couple of articles i'm writing for a magazine but if i have a chance then these are some of the books i would also like to read and i thought i'd share them with you because they might inspire you with some winter reading material too so first up is this book swiss sonata by gwessalyn graham now i first came across her writing through persephone books with this book earthen high heaven and this one i think is set i'm in montreal quebec i can't remember now but it's one i want to read and it made me interested to also learn a little bit more about her and swiss sonata is her first novel or at least it's earlier than um earth and high heaven i think it's her first one and it sounds really interesting it's set in switzerland in the 1930s and it's well set in the girls finishing school in switzerland and it starts off in january so that's why i'd like to try and get to it this month and of course all the snowy swiss slope scenes i'm sure will feature but it's meant to be very good and it also talks about the rise of fascism the political climate in switzerland just before the outbreak of world war ii and it sounds like a really good read as you know i love reading books from the interwar period and this one sounds very interesting and she's meant to be a really good writer so this definitely sold me and having gone to school in switzerland myself a swiss setting always really appeals so i'm looking forward to turning to this one another book that starts out in january that i want to read is tracy chevalier's falling angels this is set in edwardian england it starts off and highgate cemetery the eyes of two girls meet and they end up becoming friends bringing both their families together and this is a story about these two families it sounds really interesting i often enjoy tracy chevalier's writing i of course walked around highgate a lot myself when i lived in hampstead so i'm intrigued by the setting as well as the time period and the fact that it starts off in january has put this book to the top of my 2b red pile so i would like to try and get to that one a few ghost stories i'd like to get to this month as well especially this one the great coat by helen dunmore this is set in yorkshire as well as in winter time which really intrigues me it says it is the winter of 1952 and isabel carey is struggling to adjust to the realities of married life in yorkshire isolated and lonely she is also intensely cold it does get very cold here so i can understand that and her husband a doctor is rarely home and then one night she discovers an old raf great coat in the back of a cupboard she puts it on her bed for warmth and is startled by a knock at her window outside is a young man a pilot and he wants to come in so that sounds really intriguing to me it sounds like that would be a great read and yeah definitely want to get to that one another ghost story that i'd like to get to is thin air by michelle paver so many people have recommended this to me over the years and it's just been sitting on my shelf for a really long time i think my mom has read this too and she liked it a lot so i would like to get to this one it's about um mountain climbing a sort of mountain climbing expedition i think in the himalayas yeah in the himalayas in 1935 but it's also a ghost story so it sounds really intriguing to me i'd like to finally get to that one this is what my mum has recommended to me it's when nights were called by susanna jones i think this is also about mountain climbing says as the eve of the second world war approaches grace farringdon once the daring founder of the women's mountain climbing society is trapped in her dullage home haunted by the terrible events that took place out on the mountains years before grace is the last surviving member of the secret society she founded and at last she's finally ready to remember and to confess so this definitely sounds like a story that will send shivers down your spine when you read it and quite intriguing also very interesting to hear about a women mountain climb mountain climbing society because so often you just hear stories from men about mountaineering so that intrigues me about this as well and then finally two rereads that i would really like to do so i remember being absolutely terrified by the wolves of wilbury of will be chase by joe naked when i was little and i really want to reread this one i don't really remember a lot about it although of course joe nakin has set this book in a bit of an alternate world which looks like our world but is also subtly different a little bit like how philip pullman um does his books and in this world england is still completely it's become completely overrun by wolves and there's a horrible governess that features in this book i remember is really terrifying and she sends the children off to a place that they can never be found and they have to try to outwit her but there's a wonderful chase scene in this book and yeah i just remember it was really scary when i was little but i'd like to return to it and to read it again because i also remember being completely gripped by it and it makes a brilliant wintry read and then i read lorna dune just in my early teens which is maybe a bit of an unlikely choice but i also absolutely adored it it's quite a melodramatic story and i think i just really got into that when i was younger i haven't read it since though and i'd really like to reread it and see what i think of it now there's also one of the most famous blizzards in literature in this book it's set in devon and it talks about a horrific snowstorm that was so bad the snow actually forced the windows to collapse in inwards because of the weight of the snow and how even the sort of kettle the fireplace froze and yeah i remember that as being really atmospheric so for that it would be quite a good wintry read although it's one of these epic stories that spans quite a few years and um definitely several seasons but there is a really famous snow scene in this so i would like to read it again for that reason and also just because i remember absolutely loving it but a lot of people think this is quite a boring story so we'll have to see i'm interested to read it again and see what i think but anyway those are my recommendations for you to read in these colder months i hope that they will also help you while away the time as we are in lockdown in the uk these are all good books to come up with on a cold evening will hopefully provide some excellent distraction as well i'm definitely looking forward to picking up a few of these myself so i hope you enjoyed my recommendations let me know if any of them tempt you and do give this video a thumbs up if you enjoyed it you can subscribe to my channel by clicking on my face that pops up on the screen over here but i'll be back again very soon with more bookish videos thanks so much for watching and see you again soon bye

Channel: Miranda Mills

Views: 10,184

Keywords: books, reading, booktube, bookstagram, winter reads, English country living, Seasonal Living, Slow Living, Countryside, Anglophile

Id: o05uRtGoR9Y

Length: 40min 17sec (2417 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 18 2021