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Quiz: Books That Make You Feel Better About Winter

Raych Krueger

Staff Writer

Raych has so many kids (like, two, but they’re super young, which makes it seem like there are more of them) and this really cuts into her reading time. She’s using her degrees in Early Childhood Education and English Literature to teach the toddler to read to the baby so she can get back to her trashy Victorian sensation novel, or whatever. She’s also teaching her kids to travel and eat broadly, mostly through example (Do As I Do is super important, you guys), and hasn’t gone a year without hopping on a plane since she was a teenager. She recently moved from the Canadian coast to the Canadian prairies, where it gets hella cold, and if not for the internet, she’d surely be dead. Blog: Books I Done Read Twitter: @raychraych

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There comes a time when you need to look at your life and look at your choices and that time is usually winter. Why am I living in the Canadian prairies? It is hella cold here. It’s hella cold in a LOT of places right now, and while we sometimes read fiction to escape our circumstances, other times we read it to feel much, much better about them.

Here are a few books to make you feel better about your snowmageddon. Guess them if you can. It may be chilly where you are, but…

1. At least you aren’t twisting corn husks to make husk-logs for your fire so you don’t die, or grinding wheat in a coffee grinder so you can make bread so you don’t die, or risking your life to drive forty miles round-trip in a sled to bring wheat back so your entire town doesn’t die.

2. At least you haven’t been whisked off to Antarctica with your ‘uncle’ to search for the entrance to a hollow earth (fake-uncles be crazy). At least you aren’t wandering through the tundra, teenaged and alone, with no one but your imaginary friend, legendary Antarctic explorer Titus Oats, for company.

3. At least you aren’t an interplanetary envoy stuck on a planet ACTUALLY LITERALLY CALLED ‘Winter’ and then, through a series of unfortunate events, stuck in a concentration camp until, though a series of slightly more fortunate events, you are rescued but have to trek over barren frozen wasteland to freedom.

4. At least you have seen the sun in the last four months, and don’t have to shovel snow away from your door every half hour so it doesn’t trap you in your log cabin, and nobody’s toes are dying of frostbite and real? Imaginary? Wolves aren’t running wild outside your door.

5. At least you aren’t homesteading in Alaska in the ’20s and so crushed with loneliness and despair that you build yourself a child out of snow.

6. At least if the length of this winter is indeterminate, it is in the number of months and not YEARS it will last. At least there is no army of living undead waiting for the fall of an undermanned wall of ice so they can descend upon us.

7. At least you are not snowbound in an old hotel with your mad husband, a pair of creepy doll-twins, an elevator full of blood, a bunch of other stuff that wasn’t in the book either, and your ghost-seeing child.

8. At least the moon hasn’t been knocked slightly off-kilter and now you’re stuck in a cabin with your family in Apocalyptic Winter (colder than Regular Winter but probably not as cold as Nuclear Winter), trying to decide which of you should get to eat and therefore live.

via GIPHY
Survival of the Beaniest

9. At least it’s only sometimes winter, and is also occasionally Christmas.

Check Your Answers Here.