Author: Jennifer Graham

Cabin, by Patrick Hutchison (St. Martin’s Press, 294 pages)

In 2013 Patrick Hutchison was despondent in Seattle, his dreams of becoming a writer going no further than composing marketing emails and doing other copywriting gigs. His twenty-something friends “were going off and doing ridiculous things like getting careers and advanced degrees, husbands, wives, kids, dogs, and other accoutrements of the heavy-responsibility genre.”

In contrast, Hutchison’s long-term plans “ended at knowing when the leftover Chinese food would go bad.”

One day the answer to his dilemma showed up on Craigslist: a listing for a decrepit 10×12 cabin in scenic Snohomish County, about an hour and a half drive away. The price: $7,500.

Despite not having $7,500 — or, for that matter, any handyman skills — Hutchison drove up to see the place and made an offer almost immediately. His memoir, Cabin, recounts the experience of making it habitable and in the process reinventing his life. It’s no Walden, the Henry David Thoreau classic, but it doesn’t aspire to be. It’s more a story of millennial angst in the internet age and the longing for competency, connection and meaningful work.

And, of course, nature. It wasn’t so much the cabin itself that seduced Hutchison as it was the land it was on, and the views.

“I knew people that had larger places to store their lawnmowers. Architecturally, it took inspiration from drawings of houses made by preschoolers. Box on bottom. Triangle on top,” Hutchison writes.

But it was nestled in an area that was thickly conifered, with mature trees and plentiful ferns, near the Skykomish River and an enormous waterfall that Hutchison says looked like something out of the Old Testament.

Not that the neighborhood was ideal. The street was ominously called “Wit’s End Place.” Other tiny cabins nearby were “charming in a dystopian sort of way,” and many were clearly abandoned. The driveway was basically a swamp. There was no electricity, cell service or plumbing. The closest wi-fi was at a McDonald’s 15 miles away. And there were spiders — so many spiders.

Nonetheless, Hutchison only saw its potential, both as a retreat and as an answer to incessant questions about what he was doing with his life. Fixing up a cabin in the woods seemed a pretty good answer to that. “At times, it felt like the cabin and I were partners in a sort of joint self-improvement project. When the cabin was all fixed up, maybe I would be too,” he writes.

Hutchison had friends who bought into his vision and were willing to make the trek and invest their own elbow grease to build a deck and an outhouse, among other projects. As such, this is no story of a self-made man improving his lot (literally and figuratively) in the woods.

While it’s true that Hutchison emerges as a different man at the end of the story, his cabin is not the do-it-yourself project that Thoreau’s was. Even the truck Hutchison used to haul stuff to the site was borrowed from his mother. It took a village and then some. But, to be fair, even Thoreau left Walden Pond every couple of days to eat a meal at his parents’ house and drop off his laundry, and the lot belonged to his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Hutchison is genuinely funny and brings a light touch to his story of back-breaking work, particularly when it comes to his newfound infatuation with power tools. (In one scene he tells a cashier at a hardware store that he’ll also be buying a chainsaw and says he is “half expecting balloons to fall from the ceiling in celebration of such a rad purchase.”) At the same time, he is learning of the pleasures of old ways and old things, at one point bringing to the cabin a typewriter that had belonged to his late uncle, and realizing he had no idea how a typewriter worked.

There are, of course, challenges and dangers along the way, to include mudslides and falling trees. And Hutchinson, daydreaming of the cabin while he’s at his day job, doesn’t devote his whole life to the project — he is in and out of the woods while pursuing other adventures, including travel with a girlfriend who shares his distaste for the sort of life where you moor yourself to a job and a place.

He worries as the project progresses that the tiny cabin might be getting too comfortable, even in its simplicity. And 16 pages of color photos, which show the work and the results, do in fact make the place look like what has been called “cabin porn” — daydreams of a simpler existence off the grid with a wood stove glowing and light snow falling outside well-insulated windows.

These days you can buy a brand-new tiny house on Amazon for under $10K without all the work that Hutchison undertook. But his journey wasn’t about finding a place to live so much as it was about finding a reason to live, and in this his quest was like that of Thoreau, who famously wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life….”

Like Thoreau’s cabin, Hutchinson’s cabin will not be a permanent part of his life but serves as a stationary vehicle that transports him to a different way of being. Don’t look to Cabin for advice on how to restore a dilapidated tiny house or downsize your life, but as inspiration for going down the road less traveled, a well-oiled chainsaw in hand. B+ —Jennifer Graham

Featured Image: Cabin, by Patrick Hutchison

Time of the Child, by Niall Williams (Bloomsbury, 287 pages)

Irish noveliest Niall Williams’ latest book is Time of the Child, which revisits the fictional town of Faha, where much lauded 2019 book This is Happiness and another Williams novel, History of the Rain, are set.

It is a holiday novel in that the events take place during the season of Advent and involve lots of holly and a child born under mysterious circumstances. But nothing is lost by reading it in January, and in fact, that timing is possibly better since Time of the Child is a slow-cooker of a book, best read at a leisurely pace. Nothing moves very quickly in Faha, where one of the residents is a dog named Harry whose favorite place to sleep is the middle of the road, requiring drivers to wait for the mutt to move, “in dog-time and untellable weariness,” before they can proceed.

It is that sort of delightful detail that makes Williams such a pleasure to read.

The central characters in this story are a widowed doctor, Jack Troy, and his adult daughter Ronnie (for Veronica), who live at a pace that moves not much faster than the town dog. Troy is 59 and is pretty much going through the motions of life, having lost both his wife and another woman he had fallen in love with after his wife’s passing. As Faha’s only doctor, Troy has little time for despair, though; he is constantly beset with people bringing him their physical complaints, and those of others, everywhere he goes.

Ronnie is his faithful companion and professional assistant, the budding loves of her past unrealized and her two sisters having left town. (“Why would anyone want to live here? … It’s just rain and muck and beasts?” one sister had said.) Father and daughter dwell mostly in companionable silence as they go to Mass at the local Catholic church — where the pastor is slowly slipping into dementia in front of his congregation — and they make house calls throughout the region, visits for which Troy may or may not be compensated.

Enter the child — an abandoned infant, seemingly lifeless, brought to Troy by a 12-year-old boy who found her by a church gate. Dr. Troy is able to resuscitate the baby, and he and Ronnie quickly become attached to her — observing his daughter care for the infant, the doctor realizes, “It was not second nature to her, it was first.”

The presence of an infant changes everything in the household — Ronnie takes on a glow foreign to her father, and in a particularly poignant scene, she watches her usually emotionless father dance to Sinatra holding the baby. “What had come over him was as old as life on earth — a pulsed response to another, outside of and even before the existence of reason, a prime and primal engagement that took its continuance from the expression in the baby’s features. She liked it! And that was everything.”

They are reluctant to relinquish her to the state, which has a poor track record of taking care of children and the elderly (which is the same reason that Troy is so protective of the clearly failing priest), but they also know they cannot keep the child hidden — in Faha, “the lid never stayed on a story.”

And so, casting about desperately for a solution, Troy concocts a scheme to keep the child — the logistics of which also involve the doctor correcting a sin of his past — sending away a young man whom Ronnie had loved years ago. This man, named Noel Crowe, is now living in America, complicating things. (Readers of This is Happiness will recall Noel from that earlier book.)

Like Harry, the weary canine king of Faha blocking traffic in the street, Williams is in no hurry to get where he’s going; the first half of Time of the Child is character development that can frustrate readers who want things to happen. It’s not unusual for dialogue between characters to be interrupted by one or two pages of incidental information before Williams brings us back to the conversation, which a reader might have reasonably thought had ended.

It’s not until the baby arrives more than a hundred pages in that the pace picks up, and then the narrative moves almost too quickly. But Williams knows what he’s doing, and the richness of detail, which might seem unnecessary at times, bestows an intimacy with the characters that pays off — not only the father and daughter and priest, but other residents of the town, including the boy who finds the baby on the day of the town’s Christmas fair, Jude Quinlan, and the adult twins that the townspeople had given up on identifying correctly, so they just combined their names and call both of them Tim-Tom.

It requires commitment to read Time of the Child — not only because you’ll want to read slowly to savor the writing, but because for all practical purposes, you’ll be a citizen of Faha when you’re done, emotionally anyway. Which means you’ll be reading This is Happiness and History of the Rain next — not a bad way to while away the gloom of winter. A —Jennifer Graham

Books of the future

Here are some scheduled 2025 releases book-lovers can get excited about.

• Simply Jamie: Fast & Simple Food by Jamie Oliver (Jan. 7) Jamie Oliver generally permits such cheats as jarred sauces and “cook everything in one pan no really just the one pan.” This book promises recipes such as Gochujang Chicken Noodle Bake and Jarred Pepper Pasta.

• Old School by Gordon Korman (Jan. 14) Middle grade author Korman returns with this novel about a 12-year-old who has lived half his life at his grandmother’s retirement village where he has been home-schooled and schooled in music and culture by the other retirees and now has to attend a kid-filled middle school, according to the book’s description.

• Hope: The Autobiography by Pope Francis (Jan. 14) It’s the first autobiography ever published by a pope!

• Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros (Jan. 21) This third novel in the Empyrean series (Fourth Wing, Iron Flame) set in a military college for dragon riders has the author on a big-city book tour and readers signing up for midnight release parties at bookstores.

• Source Code: My Beginnings by Bill Gates (Feb. 4) One of the world’s richest men writes about his early years, before he co-founded Microsoft. “I’m planning to write two more memoirs, one about my work with Microsoft and one about philanthropy,” he says at gatesnotes.com. “But Source Code is my origin story, and I’m looking forward to sharing it.”

• Three Days in June by Anne Tyler(Feb. 11) It’s a new Anne Tyler novel, her 25th. In this one, “a socially awkward mother of the bridge navigates the days before and after her daughter’s wedding,” the publisher says.

• The Art of the SNL Portrait Photography by Mary Ellen Matthews (March 4) The 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live marches on with this book of images from the show’s bumper photos featuring hosts and musical guests, according to the book’s description.

• I Survived the Great Molasses Flood, 1919 (the Graphic Novel) by Lauren Tarshis, illustrated by Karen De la Vega (March 4) If this graphic novel series is how you introduce your kids to historical events, check out this one set in Boston.

• Sunrise on the Reaping: A Hunger Games Novel by Suzanne Collins (March 18) This second prequel is set after The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes but before the original trilogy and focuses on the Hunger Games of Haymitch Abernathy.

• When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi (March 25) He won a Hugo award for Redshirts, he was creative consultant for the Stargate TV series, and now he’s back with a novel about the moon actually being made of cheese.

• The Choi of Cooking: Flavor-Packed, Rule-Breaking Recipes for a Delicious Life by Roy Choi with Tien Nguyen and Natasha Phan (April 15) Sample pages feature Kimchi Steak Tacos and Lo Mein Spaghetti — which paints a picture of the approach of this chef who is serious about food but not fussy about rules. In the meantime, check out Choi’s MasterClass, which has a commendable amount of swears.

• Great Big Beautiful Life Emily Henry(April 22) The #1 NYT Bestselling author of Beach Read, People We Meet on Vacation and other contemporary romances gives us a fresh competitors-to-lovers tale.

• Matriarch: A Memoir by Tina Knowles (April 22) She’s a fashion designer, a businesswoman, and mom to Beyonce and Solange. Is it any wonder her new memoir comes in at 448 pages, longer than the Pope’s and Bill Gates’?

• Mark Twain by Ron Chernow (May 13) The Pulitzer-winning biographer (Washington: A Life) comes out with 1,200 pages on the life of the 19th-century humorist, steamboat pilot and writer.

• My Friends by Fredrik Backman (May 20) Teenagers and art and a cross-country journey from the author of A Man Called Ove and so many other novels, whose Instagram you should check out for more self-deprecating humor and German shepherd antics.

Brightly Shining, by Ingvild Rishøi (Grove Press, 192 pages)

It’s been 181 years since A Christmas Carol was published, and so it’s past time for another author to give us a compact, memorable holiday book that becomes as much a part of the season as shopping and eggnog. The Dickens classic was a marvel of brevity, coming in at just about 30,000 words, which is surely one reason it remains popular. No one has time to read, say, Richard Powers in December.

Three years ago, I had hopes for Small Things Like These, a slim novel written by the Irish novelist Claire Keegan, which turned up as Oprah Winfrey’s book club pick this month even though it was published in 2021. That book (Grove Press, 118 pages) wasn’t about Christmas, per se, but is set around Christmastime and has, at the heart of its deeply affecting story, a working-class man who was born to a teenage housekeeper. Furlong never knew who his father was, and yet grows up to be happily married with five daughters and becomes a sort of social justice warrior by accident when he makes a disturbing discovery while delivering coal, a reliable staple of Christmas stories.

Small Things Like These has a Truman Capote “A Christmas Memory” vibe to it, in the telling of Furlong’s back story, with passages like this:

“On Christmas morning, when he’d gone down to the drawing room [his mother’s employer] occasionally let them share, the fire was already lighted and he’d found three parcels under the tree wrapped in the same green paper: a nailbrush and a bar of soap were wrapped together in one. The second was a hot water bottle … And from Mrs. Wilson, he’d been given A Christmas Carol, an old book with a hard red cover and no pictures, which smelled of must.”

Or maybe that is a Little Women vibe. At any rate, there are letters written to Santa, and a Christmas Mass, and an ending with the kind of wild and irrational hope befitting a good Christmas story. A Christmas Carol it’s not, but it was Dickensonian enough that I decided to add the book to my Christmas collection when I finished it last year.

Now Grove Press has published another slim Christmas-themed novel, Brightly Shining, by the Norwegian author Ingvild Rishoi (translated into English by Carolina Waight). In Norway, where the book was published in 2021 under the title Stargate, the author has been compared to Dickens and also Hans Christian Andersen (who, lest we forget, gave us “The Little Mermaid” before Disney did).

Brightly Shining is the story of a 10-year-old girl (who, in Victorian times, would have been characterized as a waif) and her struggle to maintain hope in seemingly hopeless circumstances. Ronja lives with her 16-year-old sister Melissa, in an impoverished household ostensibly headed by their father, who is addicted to alcohol, has trouble holding down a job, and is usually failing to provide support of any kind for his daughters. Most of the time, there is nothing for the girls to eat but cereal, and there is no mother in the home, although Melissa tries as best as she can to be a mother to her sister.

One day, a caretaker at Ronja’s school, who is aware of the situation, points out a flier advertising a job selling Christmas trees, and she takes it home to her father. After at first dismissing it as “a job for country bumpkins,” he relents and is hired, giving wings to Ronja’s hopes: that there might be enough money for food and gifts and a Christmas tree of their own. Her biggest dream, though, is that the family may one day have a cabin of their own in the woods.

As Ronja, the narrator, recounts: “ ‘Miracles do happen,’ the caretaker used to say. ‘Sometimes there just isn’t any other way out, and that’s when a miracle happens.’”

But that’s not how things transpire. Old patterns repeat, and Melissa takes over the job selling Christmas trees, with Ronja showing up at times just to watch, and eventually getting involved in the operation.

A bully of a boss turns into the story’s villain, and Ronja befriends a widowed man living in their building, leading to one of the book’s most poignant scenes, at a holiday pageant at Ronja’s school. The old man, Aronsen, does what he can to help Ronja, feeding her a real breakfast, ironing a dress for the school pageant and even buying greenery at the Christmas tree lot, but his efforts, and Melissa’s, cannot make up for the loss of functioning parents in the child’s life, even though, as she says, “I can’t not hope. That’s just the way my brain is.”

As in Small Things Like This, Brightly Shining attempts to give us the happiest ending possible while being honest about reality, which is to say, it’s not really a happy ending at all, especially after all the talk about miracles. Let’s just say it’s as happy an ending as O’Henry gave us in “The Gift of the Magi,” meaning it requires aggressive spin to cast either book as a feel-good Christmas story.

Not to say that both books aren’t beautifully crafted — they are. Not to say that they’re not memorable — they are. It’s just that I’ve been forever ruined by the last chapter of A Christmas Carol and seek that level of merriment in my Christmas reads, which Brightly Shining and Small Things Like These refuse to supply. God bless them, anyway. B+

Faithful Unto Death, by Paul Koudounaris (256 pages, Thames & Hudson)

Traveling in rural Ecuador a few years ago, I looked out the car window to see a woman throw the corpse of a dog into a fire in her front yard. It wasn’t an act of cruelty — the dog was clearly dead — but it was still shocking to see an open-air cremation about to take place.

It was likely the best and cheapest option the woman had, faced with a decision that has confronted families ever since we started viewing animals as companions: What do we do with their bodies? In Faithful Unto Death, Paul Koudounaris walks us through the macabre history, making clear that what seems like the obvious answer — bury or cremate them — wasn’t often an option.

In Europe in the 19th century, many people took deceased dogs to rending sites where the bodies were broken down with chemicals, along with dead livestock. Terrible as that sounds, other people opted to throw their deceased animals into rivers. “In Paris, about five thousand dogs a year wound up in the Seine, the tragedy for their owners compounded by the civic cost, with the bodies polluting the river and resulting in 4,000 francs in annual cleanup fees,” Koudounaris writes.

When the rare individual tried to confer dignity on a deceased pet, things could get ugly. In 1855, a woman in Glasgow tried to inter her beloved cat in a cemetery plot she owned; an outraged mob gathered and broke open the cat’s little coffin, and police had to be summoned. It was considered blasphemous to think animals warranted the same burial customs as human beings.

But cremation wasn’t the answer either, as even for humans cremation was not yet widely accepted. So when an English family lost their beloved Maltese in 1881, they pleaded with the gatekeeper at a local park where they used to walk the dog and convinced him to let them bury him in his backyard garden. Word spread, and others began to make the same request. “Slowly his little plot was transformed into something that not only London, but also the entire Western world, had been unaware that it desperately needed.” Eventually there were more than 300 graves, animal corpses stacked on top of each other, in the gatekeeper’s garden, and he kept up the burying until he himself died in 1899.

Around the same time, pet cemeteries began cropping up in other places in Europe. In the United States, the problem of what to do with animal bodies was not so pressing, since there was plenty of undeveloped land, and you could bury anything you wanted on the frontier. Still, by the 1920s the U.S. had more than 600 pet cemeteries, and the U.S. today has more than the rest of the world combined, Koudounaris says — including one that is, bizarrely, only for coon hounds.

Some people are so enamored of their pets that they want to treat them like humans, even after death. Koudounaris tells the story of a mortician who was hired to embalm a dog that had been hit by a carriage (apparently streets were just as dangerous for dogs before cars) and bury him in a mahogany casket with a glass top. And at a mausoleum in New York, a metal box once came open, revealing not human remains but those of a parrot.

Earlier this year the New York Times published a fascinating piece about how a woman came to be buried at one of America’s most famous pet cemeteries, which is in Hartsdale, New York. Hartsdale is among the pet cemeteries that Koudounaris looks at, along with Pine Ridge, in Dedham, Massachusetts, where the fox terrier of South Pole explorer Richard Byrd is buried. The dog’s name was Igloo, appropriately enough, and his gravestone, larger than that of most humans, is shaped like an iceberg. Pine Ridge is also the resting place of three Boston terriers owned by Lizzie Borden.

Some of the most interesting stories in Faithful Unto Death, however, aren’t told in words but through photographs of monuments and epitaphs: “In remembrance of Smut, for 12 years, our much beloved cat”; “Alas! Poor Tiplet”; “Scott, who really smiled when pleased, faithful friend, guard of Anne”; “Witt – Best friend I ever had, died June 1895”; “In memory of a loving pet, Judy, killed by a tractor”; “Bingo, 1934-1950 – Let a little dog into your heart and he will tear it to pieces.”

In fact, anyone who still harbors grief for a long-gone pet may be brought to tears in solidarity with the animals memorialized here. That said, there are also some pictures I would rather not have seen, such as the mummified corpse of a dog that was found stuck inside a tree by loggers. “Stuckie” is now a tourist attraction in Georgia.

Toward the end of the book Koudounaris takes a look at what happens to pets of celebrities and animals that are celebrities in their own right. You’d think the dog that was Toto in The Wizard of Oz would have had one of those glass-topped mahogany caskets, but in fact the cairn terrier was buried at the home of her trainer, which later was razed when the Hollywood Freeway was built. “Cars now speed by above the gravesite, which is trapped under tons of concrete,” Koudounaris writes.

Grumpy Cat, the internet sensation who died in 2019, fared better and has a memorial (with a photo) at Sunland Memorial Park in Sun City, Arizona. (Even in death, Grumpy Cat has 1.4 million followers on X.)

Credit is due to Koudounaris for taking this macabre subject matter and making it engrossing; the only thing perplexing about the book is its presentation: It’s a heavy doorstop of a book, dictionary-like in heft, and maybe not the thing most people would want to display on a coffee table. That said, for people with good arm strength who don’t mind encountering a photo of a dead animal every now and then in a book, it’s a surprisingly compelling read. Kleenex recommended. B —Jennifer Graham

How to Winter, by Kari Leibowitz (Penguin Life, 272 pages)

When Kari Leibowitz was looking for a research opportunity that would help get her into a top-notch doctoral program, she reached out to Joar Vitterso, a psychology professor at the University of Tromsø in northern Norway. He agreed to become her research partner in studying why Norwegians, despite long periods of darkness and cold, seem relatively immune to the winter blues that so many Americans report.

So despite being something of a winter-phobe herself, having grown up at the Jersey shore, Leibowitz signed up to experience Tromsø’s “Polar Night” —the two months in which the region doesn’t get direct sunlight — and other things she thought would bring her misery. Instead she wound up studying, and ultimately adopting, a winter-loving mindset, which she says is the key to thriving in winter.

In How to Winter, Leibowitz expands on the article she wrote that appeared in The Atlantic in 2015 (“The Norwegian Town Where the Sun Doesn’t Rise”). Although she soon departed Norway for Stanford University — where winter lows are in the 40s and it hasn’t snowed since 1976 — that article established her as an expert source on coping with winter, and she’s made it a focus of her work since. How to Winter combines her experiences in northern climes with research from Stanford’s Mind and Body Lab on what amounts to positive thinking — reframing how we perceive experiences. Not surprisingly, it’s Leibowitz’s on-the-ground experiences that are the most interesting part of this book.

In Tromsø, which is in full darkness for most of the day between late November and late January (save for a bluish twilight that lasts a couple of hours), Leibowitz found that residents report relatively low rates of seasonal depression. Part of this is because the region is well-equipped for winter. “The city has infrastructure to keep the roads clear of snow and restaurants warm even when it’s blustery outside. Every restaurant and coffee shop has soft lighting and open-flame candles … and cafes often have heat lamps and blankets at outdoor tables so that people can enjoy coffee outside year-round.” At the city’s international film festival, held in January, people watch films outside, and it’s not uncommon for parents to let their appropriately dressed babies nap outside. The first principle of a winter mindset, it seems, is not to be afraid of the dark and cold.

Compare that mindset to the collective moaning and gnashing of teeth that occurs when it gets dark an hour earlier in New England. It’s not that the time change doesn’t have a real effect on our life, Leibowitz writes, but that Americans tend to follow a script about winter misery that begins about that time, rather than actively planning ways to enjoy the season. With regard to the November time change, for example, Leibowitz recommends reducing meetings and commitments the week of the change — seeing it as a time to catch up on rest, make our homes more inviting and cozy and begin pleasurable winter rituals, such as fires or saunas, or what she calls “slow hobbies” like baking, knitting or woodworking.

Animals, she writes, are more in tune with the changing of the seasons that humans are, and this is one reason many of us resist the advent of winter; we haven’t been having to prepare for it, and we expect our well-lit, furnace-warmed lives to go on as usual, rather than make changes. “We pretend we are not animals like any other, as if aligning with nature is a personal or moral failure. But this is a fallacy, and when we look at it plainly, we can see how nonsensical this view is.”

Then we’re told by the media that we’re suffering Seasonal Affective Disorder even though we probably aren’t — true diagnoses range from 0.5 to 3% of the population, and you only have SAD if you first meet the criteria for clinical depression — SAD is a subset of that. So you probably don’t have SAD — you just need a mindset that sees winter as wonderful, Leibowitz writes.

Leibowitz argues that a positive winter mindset is not the same thing as positive thinking, which too often tries to get us to deny the negative. We can’t think our way into its being 80 degrees and sunny when it’s snowing in January, but we can employ “selective attention” to overcome misery. Much of what bothers us about winter is anticipatory — we expect to be cold and miserable if we go outside, when actually when we force ourselves to get outside, it’s often pleasurable and at minimum makes our enjoyment of the indoors even greater when we return. “When we stop pushing against it and observe what it really feels like, asking ourselves, ‘How intolerable is this, really? Am I in danger or am I just a bit uncomfortable?’ the quality of the cold shifts and we find that maybe it’s not as bad as we thought.”

That’s one reason part of her advice to adopting a winter mindset is get outside (“You’re not made of sugar” is the title of one chapter), and she offers research that shows, counterintuitively, that when people do things like cold plunges and winter swimming, they wind up feeling warmer and happier after the shock of the experience.

Leibowitz acknowledges that it’s easier for some people to love winter than others. In Oulu, Finland, for example, known as “the winter biking capital of the world,” bike paths are cleared of snow before roads are. A number of Scandinavian cities have heated sidewalks so people don’t have to worry about falling on snow or ice. Leibowitz travels to places where it’s the norm to have heated floors in bathrooms, individual coat racks next to booths at restaurants and there are even heated toilet seats in public restrooms.

Moreover, she acknowledges, it might be difficult to adopt a “winter is wonderful” mindset if you don’t know how you’re going to pay your heating bill. Not many of us have access to the saunas of which she sings praises. And some of her advice at the end of each chapter is a bit cringy (“Take an awe walk” and “take a family nap”). The book could have been made tighter, and more effective, by icing out its Oprah magazine vibe.

Still, there’s value in much of Leibowitz’s advice, and her travels are interesting. I like many of her suggestions, such as to change the “holiday spirit” into the “winter spirit,” put as much thought into planning January and February as we do December, and instead of trying to force bright light into our winters in defiance of nature, embrace softer lighting and candles (a practice Leibowitz calls “Big Light Off.”) In fact she’s such an effective persuader that even a winter visit to Tromsø is sounding good right now. B

Every Valley, by Charles King (Doubleday, 277 pages)

George Frideric Handel was not the only inspired composer to emerge during the period of time known as the Enlightenment; Bach, Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart were also products of 17th- and 18th-century Europe.

But beloved as all of these composers are, it is Handel who reigns throughout the Christmas season, thanks to his preeminent work Messiah.

It’s widely known that Handel composed the music in just 24 days, but there’s much more to the story than that. It took a village, as it were, to create Messiah as we know it today. In Every Valley, Georgetown University professor Charles King examines the players in this story and weaves their stories together, against a cultural backdrop that is not so different from ours as we might think.

“The Enlightenment as most people actually experienced it had fewer wigs and masked balls than we might imagine today, and far more pain and muddling through,” King writes, as he lays out the cultural and economic landscape of the time.

“Politicians and critics traded barbs via pamphlets and cartoons in much the same way that social media works now. Insurrections, riots, and rebellions regularly shook the governing establishment.” Wars fomented, and slavery flourished.

Meanwhile, an eccentric, wealthy bachelor named Charles Jennens — “so afraid of the cold that he lay under six blankets in winter and four in summer” — became enamored of the idea that the prophecies and promises of the Hebrew scriptures, coupled with their fulfillment in the New Testament, offered hope for the challenging age and could best be conveyed in a musical performance. He began work on what he called a “Scripture Collection” with the thought that he might engage a past-his-prime composer to set the verses to music.

“At the heart of [Jennens’] work was not so much a statement of faith as a test of will — an affirmation of something Jennens himself had always found hard to believe in,” King writes. “It was the staggering possibility that the world might turn out all right.”

King became interested in the full story of Messiah after listening to a 1927 performance recorded in England that brought both him and his wife to tears. He learned that Handel was a celebrated musician even as a young man (in his 20s, his reputation was already such that one person would make the sign of the cross ironically when his name was mentioned). But by the time he was recruited to write this oratorio, Handel was nearing the age of 60, physically ailing and suspected to be past his prime professionally.

King takes us from the early days of Handel’s professional life, from “Rinaldo” and “Water Music,” to the composer’s association with members of the royal family and notables like Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. And because King is writing the definitive book on Messiah’s creation, his narrative frequently devolves into side stories of secondary characters, such as the salacious personal life of Susannah Cibber, the woman who would perform the alto solos at Messiah’s premiere and experience a sort of salvation through her association with the work.

These stories, while interesting enough, at times feel a bit like an unwelcome interruption into the most compelling one: the intersection of the lives of Jennens and Handel, men who seem to have needed each other like Woodward needed Bernstein.

Jennens was the epitome of what Americans call “the elite” — he “apparently had no ambition other than to lead the life of a gentleman” and seemed to have been something of a hot-house flower. But he filled his home with books, music and art, creating “a private sanctuary filled with evidence of what the world could be, rather than reminders of what it usually was.” And he had a special affinity for Handel, whom he called “the Prodigious,” and collected all his music with the zeal of your typical American Swiftie.

Meanwhile, an aging Handel was suffering from competition and losing patrons. While an extraordinarily gifted musician and composer, he had, throughout his career, relied on others for “words and stories [he] might render into song.” When he set out to put to music the scripture collection that Jennens had named Messiah, he completed the work in a little over three weeks, but it may or may not have been as divinely inspired as we have been led to believe.

According to King, a statement that has been attributed to Handel about the creation of the “Hallelujah Chorus” — “I did think I did see all Heaven before me, and the great God himself” — is dubiously sourced a century later. (He also throws water on the oft-told story of how audiences came to stand during the Chorus.)

Jennens was not present when Messiah debuted before an audience of about 700 in Dublin, with the proceeds of the night going to a local hospital and infirmary and to pay off the debts of “incarcerated paupers.” It was better-received by the audience, one of whom called it “a species of musick different from any other,” than by the man who had first imagined it, and Jennens later demanded changes, and for a while didn’t want to be associated with it. (He wrote to a confidante, “His Messiah has disappointed me.”)

It’s just as well, as popular history has largely forgotten Jennen’s role, while time has elevated Messiah and its composer to mythic proportions. The original work, which took up both sides of 130 pages, still exists in a vault at the British Library and can be viewed online (and in photographs in this book), ink blots and all.

As for the story of its creation, it’s hard to see how anyone could craft a history more comprehensive than what King has produced in Every Valley although it’s not for the casual reader or the seasonal Messiah enthusiast who lacks an attendant desire to delve into the history of the age. It’s a serious and scholarly work that keeps its distance from the religious ecstasy that its subject inspires, and insists on schooling the readers on European history, whether they’re interested or not.

Moreover, in his curious need to draw parallels to contemporary society, King at times seems to tread dangerously close to political commentary.

However, for those seeking holiday reading that is not of the Hallmark variety, Every Valley hits all the high notes. B+ —Jennifer Graham