5 Big, Marvelous Books to Tunnel Through When You’re Snowbound

Barkskins, by Annie Proulx
This epic fictional history of the timber industry is Annie Proulx at her finest. Barkskins makes good use of its more than 700 pages to span three centuries in the lives of two star-crossed families. The novel opens in 1693, as René Sel and Charles Duquet immigrate from France to Canada (then known as New France) to become indentured servants, working to fell the great North American forest. It’s a forest that seems “infinite. It twists around as a snake swallows its own tail and has no end and no beginning. No one has ever seen its farthest dimension.” From there, their fortunes diverge, with Sel marrying a native woman and Duquet gradually becoming a wealthy timber baron. Proulx traces their descendants and the chopping down of trees across five continents in this stunning novel.

Look At Me, by Jennifer Egan
Egan is probably best known for her sharp, spare 2011 novel-in-stories A Visit From the Goon Squad, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle award. But if a three-day blizzard is heading your way, you’re going to need more pages to turn, so check out her 500-pager Look At Me. It’s the involving and circuitous tale of a model whose face is damaged in a car accident then reconstructed, leaving her still beautiful but unrecognizable to those who knew her. Egan interweaves the stories of a wayward professor, a yearning teenage girl, and a mysterious chameleon-like man in a tale that remains eerily relevant.

To The Bright Edge of the World, by Eowyn Ivey
Eowyn Ivey’s debut, Pulitzer Prize finalist The Snow Child, would make a great read for a snowbound weekend. But if the blizzard is really intense, you’re going to need even more to read, and her new historical adventure novel clocks in at 432 pages. Ivey tells the story of a colonel charged with leading a mission into Alaska’s interior in 1885, when it was uncharted. She alternates his journal entries with those of his spirited, intelligent, photography-loving wife, left behind while he leads the group into the wilderness. Fans of Ivey’s magical realism won’t be disappointed with her latest, in which geese become women and women become fog.

Arctic Dreams, by Barry Lopez
If you want to wallow thematically in the cold, there’s no better occasion than a blizzard to read Lopez’s 500-page classic of nature writing, Arctic Dreams. Originally published in 1986, Arctic Dreams chronicles a series of trips Lopez took into the northern Canadian wilderness over the course of five years. He delves into the landscape, the fauna, the culture of the Eskimos, and the history of the region’s explorers, all while reflecting on how landscapes shape people’s dreams.

Swing Time, by Zadie Smith
Those of us who consider Zadie Smith to be the literary equivalent of Beyoncé already read Swing Time when it came out in November, but if you haven’t had a chance to wade through its 464 pages, a sturdy winter storm should provide one. Smith is at her best in this tale of two girls from a hardscrabble London neighborhood who meet as kids in a dance class and then part ways and destinies as Tracey, the talented one, pursues her dancing dreams, and the unnamed narrator watches her from a distance and marvels.