Great Big Books to Fend off Winter’s Bite

In stark contrast to so-called “beach reading,” these giants, epic in both size and scope, are perfect blizzard reading.

The Instructions by Adam Levin

Image credit: McSweeney's

Recommended by the Editor

5 Books That Aren't 'Twilight'

Books You Don't Have Time to Read

By: Jay Peterson |   January 2011   |  From the print edition

At 740 dense pages, there’s a fair chance Volume One of the Autobiography of Mark Twain (UC Press, $34.95) might tip over your nightstand. The enigmatic author wanted to write frankly about his life, so he requested that the work not be released until the hundredth anniversary of his death, a point at which he would be “dead, and unaware, and indifferent.”

Aged 100 years, Twain’s prose is as perfect as ever. “We steeped our thirsty souls in the reviving wine of the past,” he writes, reflecting upon a conversation with an old friend. “We uttered the names that had been silent upon our lips for fifty years, and it was as if they were made of music.” 

Twain also makes a cameo in journalist Lee Sandlin’s Wicked River: The Mississippi When it Last Ran Wild (Pantheon, $26.95), a portrait of 18th-century river life that’s as dark, twisted and murky as the Big Muddy itself—and as gritty and sepia-toned as HBO’s Deadwood.  

How Sandlin’s fellow Chicagoan, Adam Levin, found time between teaching writing at the Art Institute and Columbia College to crank out a 1,000-page opus about a brilliant 10-year-old miscreant called The Instructions (McSweeney’s, $29) is beyond me. But his debut novel has merited comparisons to the work of David Foster Wallace. 

From across the Atlantic, Howard Sounes offers up 600 more pages of Beatles lore inside the covers ofFab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney (Da Capo, $29.95). Sounes cut his teeth with biographies of Charles Bukowski and Bob Dylan, and here devotes equal time to McCartney’s Beatles and post-Beatles (and post-Heather Mills) life. 

In Travels in Siberia (FSG, $30), Ian Frazier takes us west of Liverpool and into the land of exile, where Dostoevsky, the Decembrists and countless others were banished by Russia’s heavy hand. But there’s far more to Frazier’s writing than cold war and cold weather: Frazier can make a friend anywhere, and he tells their stories with grace and humor. Frazier, like any of the other authors above, can provide ample escape in your cozy winter nest.