Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish, featuring a different top 10 theme each week.
This week’s theme is Top Ten Favorite Books With X Setting. I always enjoy the topics that are a bit open-ended like this — it’s so much fun to see the creative ideas that bloggers come up with! I myself was feeling a bit less than creative… but for whatever weird reason, sitting here in the middle of summer, I started thinking about snow… and cold… and ice… and Antarctica. So for no very good reason, my theme this week is snowy settings — books that either take place entirely in a snowy or bitterly cold place, or have very memorable scenes that take place someplace full of snow and ice.
(A note about me: I HATE being cold. So this is a weird choice for me. Still. Here we go.)
1) The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey: This magical story of a childless couple who may (or may not) have made a snow child that comes to life is full of bone-chilling descriptions of life on an Alaskan homestead.
2) A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin: The Wall! A giant wall made of ice! Need I say more?
3) The Silent Land by Graham Joyce: Honestly, one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read, set in and around a ski resort in the Pyrenees during an avalanche. Snow everywhere!
4)The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman: I just love the armored bears (hurray for Iorek Byrnison!) and the gloom and mystery of the Far North.
5) The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis: The White Witch has condemned Narnia to a never-ending winter. Snow, snow, everywhere! It actually looks lovely, but all the talking animals seem to want spring to arrive.
6) The Shining by Stephen King: A family spending the winter snowed in at a creepy mountainside hotel? Now there’s a recipe for a relaxing vacation!
7) The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder: Those blizzards scared the heck out of me at a young age.
8) Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer: An intense world-wide winter brought on by global natural disaster. Let this be a lesson to all of us: Keep canned food on hand at all times.
9) Midwives by Chris Bohjalian: Or, the perils of a home birth in the middle of winter in Vermont. Just saying.
10) The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats: A perfect picture of all the ways a kid can have fun on a day full of snow. Because I really should end this list on a cheery note, don’t you think?
I thought I’d have a hard time coming up with ten — but as it turns out, I could have kept going! So I’ll give “honorable mention” to a few more books set in the ice or snow, best read with a warm quilt and a cup of hot chocolate:
- Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple (for the Antarctica scenes)
- Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
- Ice Bound by Dr. Jerri Nielsen
- Mrs. Mike by Benedict & Nancy Freedman
- Odd & The Frost Giants by Neil Gaiman
- The Wolves of Mercy Falls series by Maggie Stiefvater
- The Ice Dragon by George R. R. Martin
- The Winter Ghosts by Kate Mosse
See, I don’t compulsively include the same books every week! Look, I made it through a whole top 10 list without mentioning Harry Potter, The Sparrow, or Outlander… oops.
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