Nobody warns you properly about an Ithaca winter before you move here, people mention “it’s cold” and “there are gorges” and leave out the part where the sky just goes gray sometime in November and doesn’t really commit to being blue again until March, and the first year I lived here I remember being genuinely confused about why I felt so sluggish until a neighbor, who’d clearly had this exact conversation with a dozen other transplants, just said “yeah, that’s the light, everyone here reads a lot more books between December and March, it’s not really optional.”

She was right in a way I didn’t appreciate until I actually looked at my own reading log, which I’ve kept on paper since before I moved here, and the density of entries between roughly week two of December and the first real thaw is almost embarrassing compared to the rest of the year. It’s not that the books are better in winter. It’s that there’s genuinely less pulling you outside, the gorges that make this town beautiful in September are just cold and a little dangerous with ice by January, and a heavy book stops being a commitment and starts being the actual shape of an evening.

I used to think of this as a downside, four months of the year where the town sort of closes in on itself, but I’ve come around on it, mostly because it means I get through the genuinely long, demanding stuff during the stretch when I have the least competing pull toward anything else. Malazan happened over two different winters, not because I planned it that way but because a ten-book epic fantasy series with a body count like that basically requires the kind of indoor, low-distraction stretch this town hands you whether you want it or not.

I don’t know if I’d trade it. People who’ve never lived somewhere with a real winter always ask if it gets to me, and it does, some years more than others, but I’ve also never lived anywhere that built reading this directly into the actual rhythm of a year, and I’m not sure I’d get through the books that need real sustained attention if the outside world wasn’t so reliably discouraging me from going outside instead.

The Thursday group notices the seasonal shift too, in its own way, our winter sessions run longer without anyone deciding that on purpose, there’s just less pull toward calling it an early night when the alternative is a dark, cold walk home instead of one more round. Some of our best sessions of Brass: Birmingham and the longer Euro-style games happened on nights in January that nobody would have chosen to stay out late for in June, when the whole town still had three more hours of usable daylight left to tempt you outside instead.

I used to think of the gorges as the actual point of living here, the thing you’d put in a postcard, and the winter as just the tax you paid for the other eight months. I don’t think that’s quite right anymore. The gorges are what get you to move here. The winter is what actually teaches you how to sit still with something difficult for as long as it takes, and I don’t know that I’d have the patience for a book like Malazan or Gormenghast if this town hadn’t spent years training it into me one gray February at a time.