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It has snowed several times since last week when I wrote Bookflurries so Magnifico suggested the theme of books with snow and ice. He mentions the children’s book by Ezra Keats, The Snowy Day which is also a favorite of mine, and the mystery Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg.
A big hat tip to him for this idea since I found lots of books that I love, too, that have snow and winter as the setting. Since tomorrow is Valentine’s Day and most of my winter book choices have a good deal of loving in them, it seemed the thing to do to add that into the title.
Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg
Publishers Weekly
The title of this quiet, absorbing suspense novel by a Danish author only suggests the intriguing story it tells...
Its chief virtue, however, is the narrator: Smilla is never less than believable in her contradictions--caustic, caring, thoughtful, impulsive, determined and above all, rebellious...
I. The number one book on my list of best loved books is Mrs. Mike by Benedict Freedman and Nancy Freedman. It is a book based on the true story of Katherine and Mike Flannigan. It is a love story set in Canada. The first few pages make Katherine seem a bit silly as she rides a train to meet her Uncle John, but the real adventures begin at once and only get more interesting as she travels by dogsled to the Peace River area. The subplot love story of Jonathan and Oh Be Joyful is also poignant. There are wolves and bears and WW I as a backdrop to their lives.
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/...
Annotation
Mrs. Mike is the love story of Katherine Mary O'Fallon, a young Irish girl from Boston, and Sergeant Mike Flannigan of the Canadian Mounted Police, who is a priest, doctor and magistrate to all in the great Canadian wilderness area under his supervision.
Another story on my list of top ten all time best books is:
II. Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/...
Synopsis
New York City is subsumed in arctic winds, dark nights, and white lights, its life unfolds, for it is an extraordinary hive of the imagination, the greatest house ever built, and nothing e xists that can check its vitality. One night in winter, Peter Lake--orphan and master-mechanic, attempts to rob a fortress-like mansion on the Upper West Side.
Though he thinks the house is empty, the daughter of the house is home. Thus begins the love between Peter Lake, a middle-aged Irish burglar, and Beverly Penn, a young girl, who is dying.
Peter Lake, a simple, uneducated man, because of a love that, at first he does not fully understand, is driven to stop time and bring back the dead. His great struggle, in a city ever alight with its own energy and beseiged by unprecedented winters, is one of the most beautiful and extraordinary stories of American literature.
III. Dorothy Dunnett has two series about love and history where snow appears from time to time, House of Niccolo series and The Lymond Chronicles.
from wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
The series shares many of locations with Dunnett's earlier six-volume series, the Lymond Chronicles: Scotland, England, France, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire.
The House of Niccolò extends much further geographically to take in the important urban centers of Bruges, Venice, Florence, Geneva, and the Hanseatic League; Burgundy, Flanders, and Poland; Iceland; the Iberian Peninsula and Madeira; the Black Sea cities of Trebizond and Caffa; Persia; the Mediterranean islands of Cyprus and Rhodes; Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula; and West Africa and the city of Timbuktu.
To Lie with Lions (1995) from the Niccolo series:
1471-1473. Set largely in Scotland, Iceland, and Flanders.
The part of the story that takes place in Iceland is wonderful.
The Ringed Castle from the Lymond Chronicles has Lymond in Russia with a winter garden on a rooftop and an eagle that he loves.
IV. The Bronze Horseman by Paullina Simons
is a love story that scorches the soul. First, there is terrible hunger in WW II. Then, there is passion fully described.
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/...
Library Journal
In 1941 Leningrad, two sisters share everything including a passion for Red Army officer Alexander. Simons, the author of Tully and other titles, was born and raised in St. Petersburg.
V. The Places in Between by Rory Stewart (OK...so his love is a dog...what does that matter?)
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/...
Synopsis
In January 2002 Rory Stewart walked across Afghanistan-surviving by his wits, his knowledge of Persian dialects and Muslim customs, and the kindness of strangers. By day he passed through mountains covered in nine feet of snow, hamlets burned and emptied by the Taliban, and communities thriving amid the remains of medieval civilizations.
By night he slept on villagers' floors, shared their meals, and listened to their stories of the recent and ancient past. Along the way Stewart met heroes and rogues, tribal elders and teenage soldiers, Taliban commanders and foreign-aid workers. He was also adopted by an unexpected companion-a retired fighting mastiff he named Babur in honor of Afghanistan's first Mughal emperor, in whose footsteps the pair was following...
VI. Jane Smiley’s Greenlanders:
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/...
Publishers Weekly
...In this vast, intricately patterned novel, Smiley accurately captures the voice of the medieval sagas. Understated, scattered with dreams and warnings, darkened by the brooding sense of unavoidable disasters to come, it is the tale of a Scandinavian settlement that lasted perhaps 500 years. With a meticulous attention to detail, the novel brings daily activities to life from cheese making to hunting walrus while examining the passions of a people under stress...
VII. Ice Station Zebra by Alistair MacLean: (This is one of his earliest books and is very intense. I liked it third best after The Guns of Navarone which is on my list of ten best books ever and HMS Ulysses.
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/...
Synopsis of Ice Station Zebra
The Dolphin, pride of America's nuclear fleet, is the only submarine capable of attempting the rescue of a British meteorological team trapped on the polar ice cap. The officers of the Dolphin know well the hazards of such an assignment. What they do not know is that the rescue attempt is really a cover-up for one of the most desperate espionage missions of the Cold War — and that the Dolphin is heading straight for sub-zero disaster, facing hidden sabotage, murder . . . and a deadly, invisible enemy . . .
VIII. Then, there is Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf and People of the Deer: Death of a People- The Ihalmiut:
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/...
Synopsis of Never Cry Wolf
Hordes of bloodthirsty wolves are slaughtering the arctic caribou, and the government's Wildlife Service assigns naturalist Farely Mowat to investigate. Mowat is dropped alone onto the frozen tundra, where he begins his mission to live among the howling wolf packs and study their waves.
Contact with his quarry comes quickly, and Mowat discovers not a den of marauding killers but a courageous family of skillful providers and devoted protectors of their young. As Mowat comes closer to the wolf world, he comes to fear with them an onslaught of bounty hunters and government exterminators out to erase the noble wolf community from the Arctic...
If you visit BN, you will find many Mowat books with snow in the story:
Synopsis People of the Deer: Death of a People- The Ihalmiut:
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/...
In 1886, the Ihalmuit of northern Canada numbered 7,000 souls; by 1946, when twenty-five-year-old Farley Mowat began a two-year stay in the Arctic, their population had dwindled to only forty. Living among them, he observed for the first time a sight that would inspire the rest of his life: the millenia-old migration of the Arctic's caribou in their teeming multitudes. With the Ihalmuit, Mowat also endured bleak winters, suffered agonizing shortages of food, and witnessed the continual, devastating intrusions of interlopers bent on exploitation...
IX. Voyage of the Narwhal by Andrea Barrett:
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/...
Synopsis
Capturing a crucial moment in the history of exploration, the mid-nineteenth century romance with the Arctic, Andrea Barrett focuses on a particular expedition and its accompanying scholar-naturalist, Erasmus Darwin Wells.
Through his eyes, we meet the Narwhal's crew and its commander--obsessed with the search for an open polar sea--and encounter the far north culture of the Esquimaux. In counterpoint, we see the women left behind in Philadelphia, explorers only in imagination. Together, those who travel and those who stay weave a web of myth and mystery. And they finally discover--as all explorers do--not what was always there and never needed discovering, but the state of their own souls.
X. Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak:
Love and love lost...snow...a candle seen in a window..."a candle burns"...
It snowed and snowed, the whole world over,
Snow swept the world from end to end.
A candle burned on the table;
A candle burned.
_Pasternak
wiki says:
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
...The word zhivago shares a root with the Russian word for life (жизнь), one of the major themes of the novel. It tells the story of a man torn between two women, set primarily against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent Russian Civil War of 1918-1920. More deeply, the novel discusses the plight of a man as the life that he has always known is dramatically torn apart by forces beyond his control.
The book I read was translated by Max Hayward and Manya Harari.
Some quotes I saved when I discussed this book with a friend.
Yuri has gone to get wood for the house where he and Lara have been
hiding out and in a prequel to the final event when he physically
feels his heart go, he feels the loss of Lara and mentally feels
something inside him has broken:
"Something within him had broken and come to a standstill. He
cursed his luckless fate and prayed God to spare the life of the
beautiful, sad, humble, and simple-hearted woman he loved. And the
new moon stood over the barn blazing without warmth and shining
without giving light."
He watches the sleigh out of sight and says the Farewell which he couldn't say to Lara:
"Farewell, Lara, until we meet again in the
next world, farewell, my love, my inexhaustible, everlasting joy. I'll never see you again, I'll never see you again."
It was getting dark. Swiftly the bronze-red patches of sunset scattered on the snow died down and went out. The soft, ashy distance filled with a lilac dust that turned to deep mauve, its smoky haze smudging the fine lacework of the roadside birches lightly traced on the pink sky, pale as though it had suddenly grown shallow.
Grief had sharpened Yuri Andreievich's senses and quickened his perception a hundredfold. The very air surrounding him was rare, unique. The winter evening was alive with sympathy, like a friendly witness. It was as if night were falling now for the first time in order to console him for his loneliness and bereavement..."My bright sun has set," he kept repeating inwardly...
And now I reach the quotes that also strike me as speaking to us, today:
Mourning for Lara, he also mourned that distant summer in Meliuzeievo when the revolution had been a god come down to earth from heaven, the god of summer when everyone had gone crazy in his own way, and when everyone's life had existed in its own right, and not as an illustration for a thesis in support of the rightness of a superior policy.
As he scribbled his odds and ends, he made a note reafffirming his belief that art always serves beauty, and beauty is delight in form, and form is the key to organic life, since no living thing can exist without it, so that every work of art, including tragedy, expresses the joy of existence...
XI. Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson:
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/...
Annotation
In 1954 a fisherman from San Piedro Island in Puget Sound is found suspiciously drowned, and a Japanese-American is charged with his murder. The trial is haunted by memories of what happened to the Japanese residents during World War II when the entire community was sent into exile.
For me, this beautiful book was enriched by the love story.
wiki says:
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Covering the case is the editor of the town's one-man newspaper, Ishmael Chambers, a World War II veteran who lost an arm fighting the Japanese. Torn by a sense of hatred for the Japanese, Chambers struggles with his love for Kabuo's wife, Hatsue, and his conscience, knowing that Kabuo is truly innocent.
Other winter stories that I have enjoyed:
Break Up, a mystery by Dana Stabenow that also has bears in it.
I Heard the Owl Call My Name by Margaret Craven.
The Coalwood Way by Homer Hickam (sequel to Rocket Boys that is also titled October Light).
Light on Snow by Anita Shreve...four hankies.
Snow in August by Pete Hamill.
The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape by Barry Lopez
So, what are your favorite stories of Love and Winter? Of course, you can talk about any kind of book.
sarahnity’s list of DKos authors:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
plf515 has a wonderful book diary Fridays early and all day
Book Review - Days of Empire
by SocProf
http://www.dailykos.com/...
I recommend reading Amy Chua’s Day of Empire - How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance - and Why They Fall. I liked Amy Chua’s previous book (World on Fire), so, I was eager to read this one as soon as it arrived in the mail...
from the front page:
Still Broken: A Recruit's Inside Account of Intelligence Failures, from Baghdad to the Pentagon
by Alex J. Rossmiller
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/...
...Superiors regularly rejected his analyses of Iraqi politics as "too pessimistic." If repeated rewrites lacked an upbeat conclusion, superiors inserted one. That his predictions turned out to be correct made no difference. This intense, partisan arm-twisting devastated morale, resulting in an exodus of agency experts, including the author. Rossmiller gives a lively insider's view of the petty and not-so-petty politics that affect the intelligence our leaders receive in their efforts to pacify Iraq; it is not a pretty picture.
-Publishers Weekly