Reading in the Cruelest Months

April is the cruelest month, or so the poet said, but for me it’s November. It starts with the end of daylight time and then just gets darker, damper, maybe a little claustrophobic. In my family, November is a month full of birthdays (my own included) and celebrations, but it’s also dotted with the kind of days they don’t make greeting cards for: the days that remind you how many years it’s been since someone died; since life, in their wake, took on new shapes.

We all have our own dark months, some of which probably fall in the summer, where you have the contrast of emotions and sunlight to contend with, or in spring, when everything feels like it should be new but that doesn’t stop old aches from weighing you down. I have never put enough thought into my rituals for the dark, heavy months, but I do have habits: I make more tea and hot toddies, watch more silly television, give myself entire days to read without getting out of bed if I don’t feel like it.

But what do you read when you’re trying to fight the urge to wallow?

There’s a kind of book that often fits this bill, for me, but it’s a kind that’s hard to identify before you’re halfway into it. It’s almost a sad banger, but of a specific subset, full of catharsis, breakthroughs, things that have to be hard before they can get easier. I would never have guessed, for instance, that GennaRose Nethercott’s Thistlefoot was going to be one of these books. It starts off rollicking and clever before shifting gears, taking itself through a whole collection of paces before winding up exactly where it always had to go: in difficult, vital, revitalizing catharsis. Not heartbreak, and not triumph. Maybe you cry at the end, but maybe you just need to sit for a while. Maybe so much happens that you get knocked out of your own head just long enough to see things from a much-needed different perspective.

For some readers, dark months are for rereading—a choice I understand but often struggle with. There are just so many more books to read. I tend to reread only if I have a reason: a new book coming out in a series I read ages ago is always a good one. (Last winter was for reading Kristin Cashore’s Graceling Realm books, which are excellent dark-months company.) Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being would be exactly the right thing to reread right now—a book I adore but remember only in vague feelings and faded images—but her more recent book is still sitting on my shelf, unopened, and I’d feel guilty leaving it there in favor of an old love.

Fight-the-wallowing books are among the hardest to recommend. You just can’t know what the inside of someone else’s head feels like; you can only try to be intimately familiar with the contents of your own mind, and the way certain books, or types of books, make you feel. Some people want comfort over challenge, and that’s valid (and reminds me that I still need to read The House in the Cerulean Sea). Some want the familiar over the strange, which works, too. If you don’t want to reread, saving a book by a beloved author—the “break glass in case of emergency” book—can be just the thing. (Sometimes, a person with too many unread books might do this by accident. I went months having forgotten the most recent Franny Billingsley was already on my shelf.)

Sometimes, when facing a dark month and the temptation of altogether too many potential TV marathons, I do what I always do when overwhelmed: Make a list. It’s not exactly a to-do list, because that sounds like work. It’s a maybe-this-would-help list, or a have-you-considered list, or a refer-to-this-when-decisions-are-hard list. It’s a list that is easier to make at the start of a dark month, when everything is only on the verge of becoming too much but isn’t actually there yet.

This is what my November reading will look like. Maybe.

Seasparrow by Kristin Cashore: It’s a new Graceling Realm novel, which means it’s a given I’m going to read it—but it’s also about a sly and complicated character, is set on a ship, and seems to take place primarily in the cold, which is a whole list of things that make me say yes and yes and yes, please, yes. Bitterblue is one of my all-time favorite cathartic books, and I know I can count on Cashore for some grade-A feelings that I don’t really know what to do with.

The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings by Geoff Dyer: I have read exactly one Geoff Dyer book (Out of Sheer Rage) about a million years ago, and I have never really stopped thinking about it. This nonfiction book is not about tennis, despite the subject of the title, but it is about artists and athletes and how they and their work age, and this all feels right for a month in which I cannot help but thing about the ends of things, and how we reach them.

The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki: I would follow Ozeki anywhere.This book is described as being about “loss, growing up, and our relationship with things,” which is essentially a list of things in which I am interested. Also it is full of talking inanimate objects.

The Book of Lamps and Banners by Elizabeth Hand: Cass Neary is my kind of comfort character. I don’t know why I didn’t read this book when I first got it, but now I wonder if I was simply saving it for a dark November when all I want is to hang out with the weirdos and the loners and the accidental detective who, in this tale, gets involved with a stolen and possibly magical manuscript.

The Broken Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin: What I said before about break-glass-in-case-of-emergency books? These are some of mine. I tore through The Broken Earth series just as fast as they came out, but have been dragging my heels on Jemisin’s earlier series—because I don’t want to run out of Jemisin books.

The thing about a list, an idea or hope or plan or concept written out (or a list that takes the form of a pile of books), is that it is a document of things to look forward to. It’s an intention, if you will. It’s a way to say to yourself that the dark month can have more in it than darkness, tiredness, and old aches. Those may be inevitable, but they don’t have to be all. Pour yourself a glass of the most indulgent thing you can think of—fancy tea, your favorite whiskey, a wine as red as garnets—and put on the coziest thing in your closet. And go somewhere else for a while with a writer who takes you by the hand and shows you a life other than your own.

What will you read in your dark months?

Molly Templeton lives and writes in Oregon, and spends as much time as possible in the woods. Sometimes she talks about books on Twitter.