#kari leibowitz

[now-winter-comes-slowly]

‘Appreciate winter for what it is, without wishing it were something different’: psychologist Kari Leibowitz on beating the seasonal blues

The researcher spent 10 years studying how attitude affects mood and behaviour, and her new book shares ways in which we can learn to value

[mercerislandbooks]

Our Favorite Nonfiction of 2024

It's very nearly the last minute, and, just in the nick of time, we have our list of favorite nonfiction from 2024. I will admit that this area is not my strong suit, so my coworkers are doing the heavy lifting. These are for the readers who want to more deeply understand the world around us, the history behind us, and the future to come. Brave readers all.

If you're looking for a behind the scenes peek at the giants of the American writing scene, pick up one of Brad's favorites, A Chance Meeting. Brad says, "American Luminaries... they're just like us! They hang out, have coffee together and get into arguments. In Rachel Cohen's wonderful new book, we eavesdrop on artists and writers from Henry James to James Baldwin and witness the impact these men and women had on each other."

As for the editing and publishing side, Caitlin loved The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America. "Judith Jones was the legendary editor at Knopf. She shaped the careers of Julia Child, Madhur Jaffrey, Anne Tyler and John Updike. Early in her career Jones saved The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank from the slush pile. What a life!"

Speaking of Julia Child, many of us love to cook (as well as read) at Island Books, and Laurie highly recommends Seriously, So Good by Carissa Stanton. She says anyone can cook from it and the food is delicious, which is exactly how I like my cookbooks!

Laurie also found Ina Garten's memoir, Be Ready When the Luck Happens "full of humor and dishy storytelling. The Barefoot Contessa entertains as she weaves the story of her childhood meeting Jeffrey and becoming THE Ina Garten. You'll enjoy this from start to finish!"

As for Cindy, her favorite nonfiction was Doppelganger by Naomi Klein. She says, "In Doppelganger, Canadian author, activist and cultural analyst Naomi Klein tours the persistence of The Doppelganger in history and literature while reckoning with her personal doppelganger, Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth turned conspiracy theorist ("Other Naomi"), with whom she is chronically confused or interchanged with by the public, mainly online. Part memoir, part social critique, Klein touches upon on issues of self-identity, self-presentation, online identity, the rapid dissemination of bad information, news, fake news, and the simmering entry of AI into our online constructs among many other factors that over the last few decades have contributed to the accelerated political polarization and societal disparity we are experiencing today."

Back to the realm of what we can control, from the author of Four Thousand Weeks, Victor highly recommends Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. "The perfect book for embracing and accepting your imperfections." Sounds like a good way to start out the new year!

Looking for a seafaring adventure to fill the void left by David Grann's The Wager? Brad says, look no further! "Hampton Sides brings Captain James Cook's final voyage to life in The Wide Wide Sea, while thoughtfully addressing the moral complexity of Cook's encounters with the indigenous populations of the Pacific Ocean."

If you'd like to explore a little closer to home, Nancy can't stop talking about Born of Fire and Rain. She says it's for the reader who is interested in the science and ecology of the Northwest. Plus it's beautifully written and illustrated. Come for the cover, stay for the words.

And for the micro-ecology of our own backyards, Backyard Bird Chronicles is perfect. Nancy says, "This is a great gift for anyone who likes to look out the window. Tan is showing us how to observe with no ulterior motive. Just the birds and beautiful drawings provide wonderful entertainment."

Caitlin loved There's Always This Year, saying it's "a book of fathers, sons, life, and, of course, basketball." And she picked Bluff, by Danez Smith, as a standout poetry collection from this year. She says she often read through individual poems multiple times, and calls it a "deeply thought-provoking look at civil action."

My own contribution is How to Winter, which I enjoyed so much that I wrote a whole blog about it. It's perfect for this time of year, but has tools that can help us shift our mindsets during any challenging times.

I hope one of these catches your eye, either for you, or for the nonfiction reader in your life! This link will take you to the book list on our website:

2024: Our Favorite Nonfiction

Happy perusing!

-- Lori

[mercerislandbooks]

Book Notes: How to Winter

Common wisdom around here is that summer doesn’t start until after the 4th of July and can stretch into the middle of September. But once the rains get started and we fall back into The Big Dark, we’re in for a long run of cloudy days, blustery winds, and waking up and going home in the dark. I don’t particularly have a problem with winter — beyond obsessing about road conditions whenever we get snow — but browsing in the Peak Picks section at my library, How to Winter caught my eye. I sat down with it as soon as I got home; reading it felt like taking a deep breath.

Dr Kari Leibowitz begins her book with her first exposure to an Arctic Tromsø winter as a student researching “seasonal variation in well-being”, assuming that people deprived of swathes of sunlight for months on end would have a negative association with the season of winter. What she found was exactly the opposite. For those who live in places where the season can last months beyond our Northwest winter, even during the coldest and darkest months of the year, there are delights to be found, if you know where to look.

Dr Leibowitz moves through 3 different strategies in How to Winter — Appreciate Winter, Make It Special, and Get Outside. At the end of each chapter, she wraps up the major takeaways with a winter practice section, putting into action the concepts she discusses. I was particularly taken with the idea of dividing the season of winter into micro-seasons, personalized to my own experience. The months we call "winter" aren't the same day after day, there are nuances and shades. The light changes as the days get shorter, and I liked the idea of paying attention to what each phase of winter brings. I'm also adopting her ritual of a time in the evening she calls “big light off” — when the overhead lights are turned off and the rooms are softly lit, letting the contrasting pools of darkness make a room feel cozy.

As well as being filled with great strategies, the writing itself is deeply evocative. I now have a vivid idea of what jumping into icy water might feel like, although I'd rather be bundled up and sipping tea on a snowy terrace under a heat lamp for a wintertime outdoor adventure. But, of course, the joy of reading is getting to experience all of this vicariously.

In the end, winter comes and we can’t control it. We can’t control when the sun rises and sets. We can’t control if it’s snowy or icy or rains every day of the week. But with the help of How to Winter, we can make space for some light and warmth to hold onto as we keep moving forward, day by day.

— Lori

[the-end-of-art]

Cozy rather than dark

From The Norwegian Town Where the Sun Doesn’t Rise by Kari Leibowitz at The Atlantic

But I also believe the cultural mindset of Tromsø plays a role in wintertime wellness. I found myself the happy victim of mindset contagion after Fern told me she refused to call the Polar Night the mørketid, or “dark time,” preferring instead to use its alternative name, the “Blue Time” to emphasize all the color present during this period. (Plenty of people with a positive wintertime mindset might still refer to the Polar Night as the “dark time,” but Fern’s comment was indicative of one of the ways she purposefully orients herself towards a positive wintertime mindset.) After hearing this, I couldn’t help but pay more attention to the soft blue haze that settled over everything, and I consciously worked to think of this light as cozy rather than dark. And rather than greeting each other with complaints about the cold and snow, a common shared grumble in the U.S., my Norwegian friends would walk or ski to our meet-ups, arriving alert and refreshed from being outdoors, inspiring me to bundle up and spend some time outside on even the coldest days.

As far as we are aware, Vittersø and I are the first to examine wintertime mindset, and we are all too familiar with the scientific mantra that correlation does not equal causation. Thus, we can’t say with certainty that having a positive wintertime mindset causes people to have greater life satisfaction, or vice versa—only that these things are somehow associated. And this is not to suggest that those experiencing clinical wintertime depression, or Seasonal Affective Disorder, can magically cure themselves by adjusting their mindset. There’s a big difference between feeling cranky about the cold and clinical seasonal depression. Yet our research data—and my personal experience—suggest that mindset may play a role in seasonal well-being, and the area appears ripe for future research. I hope to conduct some of this future research myself; when I leave Tromsø, I will head to Stanford University to pursue my Ph.D. in social psychology, with Crum as my advisor.

But I plan to keep my ties to Tromsø, too. Studies comparing wintertime mindset in colder U.S. states to our data in Norway could provide insight into cultural views of winter. Similarly, studies that induce a positive wintertime mindset by helping people pay attention to its benefits could answer questions about the role of mindset in wintertime well-being. As someone who moved from New Jersey to Georgia because I hated the cold, my personal experiment in wintertime mindset has left me convinced that, with the right mindset, it’s easy to love the Polar Night.

(http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/07/the-norwegian-town-where-the-sun-doesnt-rise/396746/)