The Wood at Midwinter

(by Susanna Clarke)

This is the second book I’ve read this month that’s a read-in-a-single-sitting wintry kind of book. I read this one while watching snow fall outside and appreciated the book’s setting—which is, go figure, a snowy wood. Victoria Sawdon’s gorgeous illustrations add a lot to the text, which is about a young woman named Merowdis who cares about animals and trees and wants a child of her own, though she has also wanted to be a nun. Merowdis’s sister calls her a saint, and while she’s in the wood one winter day, she has a vision that she knows will come true, because the trees have told her so.

Best lines: “All woods join up with all other woods. All are one wood. And in that wood all times join up with all other times. All is one moment.”

In the afterword, Clarke talks about Jorge Luis Borges and Kate Bush and how she found herself “fascinated by characters who are bridges between different worlds, between different states of being, characters who feel compelled to try and reconcile the unreconcilable.” I’ve loved Hounds of Love since I was in high school and listened to Aerial a bunch when it came out, but I’ve never listened to 50 Words for Snow, which Clarke talks about at some length, and now I feel like I should rectify that.