Dear Reader,

Greetings from the mid-point between Christmas and New Year’s, a time one might naively think would be simple and chockablock with free time for writing and pondering and blogging, yet one would be wrong, for it is a poorly kept secret that childcare for a three-year-old can and often does take up nearly every last moment of the day.

Still, I have stolen moments—during a nap here, after bedtime there—to pull together today’s essay. And I’m excited to share it with you, because I want to share a winter tradition that gives my life shape and meaning.

As it happens, I didn’t have time to include any motes. As my kid would say, That’s sad. Nonetheless, I’m sure this email is long enough. Thank you, as always, for reading.

– Jasper

In Praise of Reading a Big Winter Book

When blustery, dark winter falls across the land, we naturally favor cozy things: steaming cups of tea, brightly colored sweaters, house-decoration rituals, gatherings with friends, hot baths, candlelight, soups, blankets, cream-based cocktails, movies from childhood, cookies, going to bed early. To this list I propose an addition: a big winter book.

A big winter book is, well, just what it sounds like. It’s a book long enough that for all but the most devoted readers it will take at least a few weeks or maybe even a month or two to finish. Likely a novel or a work of history, a big winter book must offer a world that you get to re-enter each time you pick it up.

A big winter book should be full of mood and perhaps some textual difficulty. Reading this particular book might feel a bit ambitious. Maybe you usually don’t read books this long or this demanding. But it’s winter, you don’t have so many other demands on your time and attention. You can tackle a big winter book, promise yourself to it, give yourself over to it.

The hope is that reading your big winter book will be enough of an experience that it will mark out a minor era in your life. You might even later look back and remember, “Oh yeah, that was the year I read that book.”

The big winter book might even become a ritual. Next year, when the days get short and the weather turns cold, you get to pick out another big winter book. This seasonal tradition can join with all the other ones to give the year rhythm and shape.

Last year, my big winter book was Little, Big by John Crowley. I burrowed deep into its 538 dense pages, entirely enchanted by its meandering, multi-generational story about a family that lives halfway in the realm of faerie. I read it before bed each night, over coffee in the morning, in the bath on a Sunday night, at the diner while waiting for a friend, and basically whenever I could. I was committed to it, a loyal reader for the six weeks it took to finish it.

Wintering deep inside a big book like this, you end up finding different ways that it spreads back out into everyday life. I discussed a passage where the narration drops into the consciousness of a mouse on an episode of my podcast. I mentioned Little, Big in a blog post about another book, John Ruskin’s The King of the Golden River, noting how Ruskin seemed to inspire Crowley. (“Crowley has Brother North-Wind while Ruskin has Southwest Wind, Esquire.”) I even found, randomly, a newsletter by Joanne McNeil where she mentioned remembering “a line in Little, Big about how every holiday season feels like a continuation of the last” but not being able to find it. I found the passage:

By the end of my six winter weeks with the book, I will confess that I felt rather exhausted of Crowley, the author. His characters are almost all white, but in the second half of the book he creates a Dominican manic pixie dream girl to be girlfriend to the protagonist, and she is a truly crude, even offensive caricature of a New York latina. And then in the closing chapters we meet a magical Black man who serves as a wise, hackneyed spirit guide before being turned into a tree. The book came out in 1984, it was a different time, I know, I know—still, these parts nearly had me putting the book down.

But it was my big winter book! I decided to stick it out—and I’m glad I did. Ultimately, it was a deeply transporting and often quite beautiful story. And it had a vision of faerie that I found at turns creepy and entrancing but never less than convincing.

Once I’d finished Little, Big, I listened to the Weird Studies podcast episode about the book, which I’d been looking forward to—I’d picked the book partly on the two hosts’ recommendation. But I found the episode oddly lackluster, far less interesting than my own experiences of reading the book.

This year, I decided sometime in November that my big winter book would be Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon. But then a few days ago, when I finished my last book and was finally ready to embark on the big read, I got cold feet. Maybe there was some other book I should read? So I drew a wincing hot bath, and while it filled I picked out a few possible contenders from the bookshelves and arranged them, alongside Mason & Dixon, on the toilet seat. Once in the bath, the first book I picked up was Mason & Dixon—and I proceeded to wolf down 40 pages. No need to second-guess my big winter book after all.

Mason and Dixon, all 773 pages of it, was published in 1997, but it is written with the diction and typography of a mid-19th-century novel—think Moby Dick—complete with constant abbreviations and capitalization of nouns. It’s a weird, challenging text. Check out the first sentence:

It goes on like this, though it also comes to include jokes about “not inhaling” marijuana smoke, and long set pieces featuring a talking canine known as the Learnéd English Dog. (Later, his name shortened to LED, he “blinks”; reading Pynchon one groans constantly.) The plot is ostensibly a retelling of the expeditions of the surveyor-astronomers Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, including their recording of the famous Mason-Dixon line on the eve of the American Revolution. But as with all Pynchon, it is really about the capturing of a vibe, a scene, a milieu, a certain paranoia, the way people talk—and then translating that into masterful, winding prose interlarded with snatches of doggerel and song. (If you’re new to Pynchon but curious, I heartily recommend Alan Jacobs’s blog post, “Pynchon: An Introduction”.)

I’m not that far into the book so far. Who knows, I’ll probably still be reading it in March! But I’m glad to be escaping, daily, into its world.

Today’s novels tend to be short, with a simple prose style, a relatable protagonist, and a more or less tidy plot. These sorts of books can be great! But for me, picking a big winter book is an invitation to push beyond these market forces. Think of it as the opposite of a “beach read.”

The erstwhile fashion blog Blackbird Spyplane recently published a lovely essay titled “This life gives you nothing.” It’s about, you know, what it feels like to be alive in 2025. But it’s also about choosing to put down the phone and really immerse yourself in a novel:

Sounds sort of like a big… fall… novel?

The author goes on to talk about how hard it is to read in a truly immersive way, especially after looking at one’s phone. And they explain how reading like this has an anticapitalist, anti-attention-economy edge.

All true, all true!

But also—let’s not forget how fun reading can be. A big, engrossing book is a diversion, an invitation, a portal to a different world. Too often, we tell ourselves we don’t have enough time to get into one. This world is too busy, too demanding. We put it off.

And to that impulse I say, why not give a big winter book a try?

I’m so glad to have you as a reader. If you’ve enjoyed this email, have you considered forwarding it to a friend?