This past week has been a topsy-turvy one for me! The kids had a snow day (always seems to happen on the busiest days--funny how that works!). I had a TON of paperwork to wade through (amazing how in this digital age, we still have so much paperwork). And then, my son was home sick for two days. (Parenting tip: Do NOT give your sick child a little bell to ring from his bed if he needs anything. By the end of the day, you will cringe at the slightest clink of that bell!) So, the blog schedule here was thrown off. You're seeing below what would've been Wednesday's post. (I hope your week was smoother sailing!)
Delightful Books for Frightful Weather
The weather here has been so "blizzardy" lately that even this die-hard nature girl is having a hard time leaving the coziness of the house (except to take a certain velvety-eared companion for her walks). But one upside of dastardly weather is that it's the perfect excuse to curl up with a good book. Here are a few books I love, just right for the next time you're snowed in.
Cookbooks are just so cozy by nature--reading about whipping up steamy things in the kitchen always makes me feel a few degrees warmer. And Nigella Lawson is the queen of cozy cookbook-writing (despite her seductress TV persona). It helps that I'm an anglophile, but her British witticisms are so charming, I end up reading her cookbooks straight through for the writing alone. I have too many cookbooks to count, but these ones (pictured above) are my favorites for pure reading pleasure:
- Lidia's Family Table by Lidia Bastianich
- Perfect Recipes for Having People Over by Pam Anderson (not the one from "Baywatch"!)
- Think Like a Chef by Tom Colicchio
- Feast: Food to Celebrate Life by Nigella Lawson
- Nigella Bites by Nigella Lawson
- How to Be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking by Nigella Lawson
Pictured above are three very different non-fiction books that I highly recommend:
- How to be Parisian Wherever You Are: Love, Style, and Bad Habits by Anne Berest, Audrey Diwan, Caroline de Maigret, and Sophie Mas. (Cheeky and chic!)
- This I Know: Notes on Unraveling the Heart by Susannah Conway. (A photographic journey through grief and recovery, full of hard-earned wisdom and dreamy pictures.)
- What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund. (A fascinating look at how our imaginations conjure up characters and scenes at lightning speed.)
In deepest, darkest winter, I like to reach for books that show me the warm, golden light at the end of the icy tunnel--books with springtime visions of flowers, trees, and blue skies with fluffy white clouds. Here are some of my favorite books that fit the bill (pictured at the top of the post):
- Flowers for the Home by Malcolm Hillier
- Kittens in the Sun by Hans Silvester
- The Book of Clouds by John Day
- The Beauty of Trees by Michael Jordan (not that Michael Jordan)
- Flower by Christopher Beane
Winter is also the perfect time to check out a stack of travel books from the library. Choose guides to some tropical islands or just places you'd like to explore in real-life or fantasy, and go on a little armchair vacation! (It's also fun on snowy days to go through your photo albums of your favorite vacations.)
The books pictured below have nothing in common except that I loved them and learned from them:
- Ethan Frome and Summer by Edith Wharton. (Fiction, obviously.)
- The Philosophy of Andy Warhol by Andy Warhol. (Master of the sound bite!)
- The Art of Sign Language by Christopher Brown
- Inner Simplicity by Elaine St. James
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
When you're snowed in, it's the perfect time to actually look through your coffee table books instead of just using them to catch the dust. Choose ones with the most beautiful, intricate pictures and really study the details on each page. Some of my favorites are pictured below:
- The Garden Book by Phaidon Press
- The Golden Age of Sailing: Classic Yacht Photographs by Beken of Cowes
- Girl with a Pearl Earring: Dutch Paintings from the Mauritshius by Lea Van der Vinde
Finally, the following three books represent the past and the future for me. I think winter is a great time to go back to your favorite childhood books and read them anew. (Now that's cozy!) It's also a great time to make a reading resolution. Here's mine: I'm going through an Anne Lamott kick lately, so my goal for the near future is to read all of her books!
- Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace by Anne Lamott
- When We Were Very Young by A. A. Milne
- The Story of Zachary Zween by Mabel Watts
That's my winter reading list--hopefully, it will tide you over 'til warmer days are here!
How 'bout you? I'd love to hear what you're reading and loving right now--please share!
P.S. Some of these books have links to Amazon so you can take a peek at them, but my first (and greenest!) recommendation is to check them out at your local library. My second recommendation is to buy them at a secondhand bookstore. Happy reading!
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