Winter Solstice

(by Nina MacLaughlin)

This is a book to read in one day—maybe ideally in one sitting, though I started it on my morning commute and finished it at home in the evening. It’s a book to read on or near the winter solstice, on a day when it gets dark early (sunset here in NYC on the day I read this was at 4:30 pm). It’s a book to read if you love winter, and maybe also if you don’t, though I can’t really speak to that because I do love winter—snow and crisp air and bundling up, ice skating at an outdoor rink, lighting candles and curling up with books on dark nights. Nina MacLaughlin writes beautifully about winter and cold and dark, about short days and long nights, about figures of myth, about winter traditions. She writes about her own winter experiences and memories too, and I really like the way this book blends personal winter moments with larger cultural stories. (Do you have an album that feels especially wintry to you? For MacLaughlin it’s “The Letting Go” by Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. For me it’s “Vespertine” by Björk.)

I like how lyrical MacLaughlin’s prose is, like when she’s writing about watching people putting up Christmas lights – “huge arrow tips of light aimed into the big black nightsky” and lights wrapped around bushes looking “as though the constellations themselves had been blown by wind and caught in the net of branches.” MacLaughlin was a double major in English and Classics and I think it shows—in her style as well as in her points of reference.

There are so many beautiful sentences and phrases in this book—too many for me to quote. I love the description of the “orange glow from windows against deepest evening blue” on winter nights. I love this: “Snow changes the world. It changes the light. It changes all the edges.” And I really love this, about how when MacLaughlin was a kid, she and her brothers would go around the house turning on the electric candles in the windows in the evening, and how sometimes she would wait for a car to pass to turn a candle on, hoping someone in the car might see it: “A secret bit of fortune, a signal when you needed it, connection to the larger spark. I timed the light with the hope that someone might feel that they were being offered something, because they were.”

Now I just need to remember to read Summer Solstice when June rolls around.