WINTER: The Story of a Season, seasonal celebration of hygge...in tartan

WINTER: The Story of a Season
VAL McDERMID (illus. Philip Harris)
Atlantic Monthly Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$22.00 all editions, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Non-Fiction For the week ending January 25, 2026

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this radiant work of creative nonfiction, internationally beloved novelist Val McDermid delivers a dazzling ode to a lost world, ruminating on a single winter in her life as she journeys into the heart of the season’s ever-evolving community-based traditions

Val McDermid has always had a soft spot for the bitter clarity of a crisp cold day, the crunch of frost on fallen leaves, and the chance to be enveloped in big jumpers and thick socks.

In Winter, McDermid takes us on an adventure through the season, from the frosty streets of Edinburgh to the windblown Scottish coast, from Bonfire Night and Christmas to Burns Night and Up Helly Aa. Recalling in parallel memories from her own childhood—of skating over frozen lakes and carving a “neep” (rutabaga) for Halloween to being taken to see her first real Christmas tree in the town square—McDermid offers a wise and enchanting meditation on winter and its ever-changing, sometimes ephemeral, traditions.

A hygge-filled journey through winter nights, McDermid reminds us that it is a time of rest, retreat and creativity, for scribbling in notebooks and settling in beside the fire. A treat for the hunkering-down, post-holiday reading season, Winter is a charming and cozy celebration of the year’s idle months from one of Scotland’s best-loved writers.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: See, that's the thing about "traditions"...they start, and change, and then vanish. They're human-made decisions, all of them. Collective loss of interest is killing awards shows on TV, which were a staple of my own TV-blighted childhood. It felt immutable: Watching the Oscars was a ritual. It might've been the only time our TV was tuned to ABC until the late 1960s. It was a ritual in my teens, too, among the theatre kids I hung out with. Now Disney's taken it away from ABC to go onto Hulu, the corporate streaming service for things they don't think will earn much money.

A tradition of fifty years shifting?! Whaaat? Traditions shouldn't change! They make the framework of our lives!

They do indeed do that. As Val McDermid's compact essay on the rituals she's made and those she's inherited from her family (her mother's improvised soup a good example) of the cold season discusses, how exactly they do that is a matter of decision and choice. Her wintertime activities growing up in freezyfrosty cold Scotland could not've taken place in my contemporaneous Sun-Belt childhood...I've only seen frozen-over ponds maybe three times since moving to New York's heat island in the 1980s, but that's three more than I ever saw in Texas...my own winter rituals of shuffling up wet live-oak leaves to see what was living under them, and putting out the toad house, wouldn't've made her radar.

In remembering her own place in the march of the seasons, Author McDermid offers us many fresh bits and bobs to incorporate into our own seasonal traditions, appreciations of reading she's done while cozied away from cold and wind, foods that warm and comfort, poems she's written and read (nothing is allowed to be poetry-free in this decade, to my disgust) all offer the reader delights to consider adding to their own lives.

What a wonderful read, what a wonderful gift to (self-)gift to the resistant cold-hater and the delighted snugness addict alike. The illustration, not provided to reviewers for reproduction, are charming and atmospheric, though what I'd call pedestrian. I can't offer a fifth star to something that contains this much poetry. I'd probably knock a bit off even absent the poetry because the illustrations aren't that interesting to me, but I know many will enjoy them.

Author McDermid's fiction readers are strongly urged to pick the book up because it is so interestingly in tension with her very noir crime novels. It might very well have been my most enjoyable moment trying to put Karen Pirie into the time young Val sees her first xmas tree in the public square!

A Book-A-Day #17: THE FUN WE'VE HAD, a novel that surprised me

THE FUN WE'VE HAD
MICHAEL J SEIDLINGER
Lazy Fascist Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 6* of five

The Publisher Says: Two lovers are adrift in a coffin on an endless sea. Who are they? They are him and her. They are you and me. They are rowing to salvage what remains of themselves. They are rowing to remember the fun we've had.

My Review: The Doubleday UK meme, a book a day for July 2014, is the goad I'm using to get through my snit-based unwritten reviews. Today's prompt is to discuss a novel that surprised you.

Seidlinger is what a mating between Djuna Barnes and Samuel Beckett would've produced: Illusionless in his pessimism, joyful in his schadenfreude, and both human and humane enough to wrap his bitter pills in pretty words.

He wasn't at all sure this was excitement, but at least for now, the glimpsing of something else, something, anything, was enough to keep the momentum, the same momentum that seemed to outline his days. What might have been a lazy, relaxing Saturday became a cause for adventure, a curious matching between him and her, their search to be out, on the city, the town, so as to stave off being on the outs with each other.
That's what it is, was, and will always be.
Nothing would change. Nothing is wrong.
This is just another adventure. New thrill.
"Are we having fun?"
Of course they are. When every feeling is time-stamped and the life you lead becomes the life you led, there cannot be a whole lot more to do except admit right from wrong.

So, Michael Seidlinger. He's this guy, you know?

He wrote this book, which before we go any further down the rabbit hole let me assure you I purchased with my very own United States dollars as I am nowhere *near* hip/cool/hot/whatever enough to score an ARC, a book which by all rights he's too goddamned young to understand still less create. It's a very trenchant metaphor, He and She and the Deep Blue Sea separated, contained, bound, sustained, trapped, saved by a shared coffin. The consciousness of He and She is very much not shared, except the two are inextricable and still completely sealed off from yet bound to the experience of the other:

Touch being only touch, both of them imagining the warmth that would have been shared if their bodies had been bodies alive and still able to be repaired, they lay there like it had been a bed and not a coffin. The final end.
Not yet.
No.
Not yet, she fought the ghosts.
They reminded her. Tell him. Tell him.
She would tell him. Later.
"Later" arrived and left and returned once more. Still, she wouldn't tell him.

We mourn and grieve for Him and Her in their shared coffin, dead, living only in separate minds that are contained within a final resting place tossed on a restless expanse of endlessness.

Ghosts in the sea, all of us, whispering ghosts, the sea's physical voice a subsonic boom of waves crashing and moving the plates of the earth's crust a micron or two, and whispering "the end" to the living, "no end" to the dead, and "Hello Kitty" to the Japanese.

New Review of a title close to my what-passes-for-a-heart 23 May 2013

I got a review in a new-to-me and really cool blog:
My newly calm spirit has mused aloud about the beauty of A DIFFERENT KIND OF LUXURY, and the charm of its contents, at The Small Press Book Review.

Some books are perfect marriages of form and content. This is one. It's simply lovely and quite a luxe little item all by itself.