There are two types of people in this world: those who loathe winter and those who love it. The first group wants to run to a Caribbean island at the first sign of a chill. The latter type can’t wait for the first snow, boots, Sochi 2014, and all things that glisten with the promise of frost.
Instead of counting the days until another polar vortex is upon us, dive into our snow files with ebooks that promise to make you grab your thermals and some hot chocolate.
In this award-winning classic, Barry Lopez explores the ways the human imagination engages with a landscape at once barren and beautiful, perilous and alluring, austere yet teeming with vibrant life, and shot through with human history. The Arctic has for centuries been a destination for the most ambitious explorers—a place of dreams, fears, and awe-inspiring spectacle.
Based on Lopez’s years spent traveling the Arctic regions in the company of Eskimo hunting parties and scientific expeditions alike, Arctic Dreams investigates the unique terrain of the human mind, thrown into relief against the vastness of the tundra and the frozen ocean. Eye-opening and profoundly moving, it is a magnificent appreciation of how wilderness challenges and inspires us.
Wolverine Cirque by Joseph Olshan
Sam and Mike, top-notch skiers, hike miles off piste to face a harrowing headwall of snow, a sheer descent that challenges their skill, their endurance, and ultimately, their ability to survive.
At the center of the story is Sam’s painful and poignant reminiscence of a complicated and doomed love affair with Luc, a Division I soccer player who struggles with his identity and the surprising power of desire finally unleashed. As both men grapple with the intensity of their affection for one another, Sam is forced to reckon that his attempt to master Wolverine Cirque is really a futile effort to stay the arguably more difficult course of his declining youth.
The Icerigger Trilogy by Alan Dean Foster
Icy, desolate, and sharply carved by hurricane-force winds, Tran-ky-ky is a terrible place to crash-land. But a botched kidnapping aboard the interstellar transport Antares sends Ethan Frome Fortune and a handful of his fellow travelers tumbling toward the stormy planet. Stranded and cut off from civilization, the castaways struggle to survive.
At Winter’s Endby Robert Silverberg
The time of falling death stars ushered in the Long Winter—eons of cold that caused plants and animals to vanish from Earth and drove people to take refuge in underground cocoons. Human ingenuity had never faced a greater challenge. For seven hundred thousand years, generation after generation was born and died below the Earth’s surface. But now, one small tribe is sensing change. Chieftain Koshmar is sure that the New Springtime is near, so she leads her people above ground to explore the new world that awaits. The unfamiliar Earth, still a frozen shell of its former self, will test their mettle in every way, leading the people of the tribe to the brink of their destiny—or to their doom.
The Dead of Winterby Michael Allegretto
Joe Bellano never hurt nobody. A gentle barber who takes bets on the side, he’s muddling through life when his world comes crashing down around him. First he’s arrested by an overzealous police force hoping for dirt on the local mob. Released after convincing the police that he’s strictly small time, Bellano is trying to get back to normal when his teenage daughter vanishes.