Ah, Petruschka, this week the Reading List goes for a dance in the snow. (Remember:
Every Reading List now contains a deliberate error in search of correction by an alert reader.) Herewith, some works featuring les neiges d’antan:
Call of the Wild, by Jack London. Now mostly forgotten, London was the most popular American writer in the first two decades of the 20th century. $ ICall of the Wild, written from the perspective of an Alaskan sled dog named Rover, is his best novel.
Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton. This is Wharton’s tenderest and most hauntingly gloomy book — set, for once, not in the fashionable drawing rooms of New York and the Continent but in the snows of western Massachusetts.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. His first, shortest, and possibly greatest piece of writing, the unforgettable portrait of a “good day” in the Gulag — below zero temperatures, harsh treatment, but a little more bread and soup than usual and some pleasant conversation.
