From One Book Lover

When the Year Grows Old   I cannot but remember   When the year grows old— October—November—   How she disliked the cold!   She used to watch the swallows   Go down across the sky, And turn from the window   With a little sharp sigh.   And often when the brown leaves   Were brittle on the ground, And the wind in the chimney   Made a melancholy sound,   She had a look about her   That I wish I could forget— The look of a scared thing   Sitting in a net!   Oh, beautiful at nightfall   The soft spitting snow! And beautiful the bare boughs   Rubbing to and fro!   But the roaring of the fire,   And the warmth of fur, And the boiling of the kettle   Were beautiful to her!   I cannot but remember   When the year grows old— October—November—   How she disliked the cold! - by Edna St. Vincent Millay courtesy poets.org

Winter is the perfect time to bundle up, grab a cuppa and climb into a good book. Who's with me? Let's form the Polar Book Club! The 2015 Polar Book Club selection is Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin. Here is a description from Helprin's website: Set in New York at the beginning and the end of the twentieth century, Winter´s Tale unfolds with such great narrative force and beauty that a reader can feel that its world is more real than his own. Standing alone on the page before the book begins are the words, I have been to another world, and come back. Listen to me. In that world, both winter and the city of New York (old and new) have the strength and character of protagonists, and the protagonists themselves move as if in a vivid dream. Though immensely complicated, the story is centered upon Peter Lake, a turn-of-the-century Irish burglar, and Beverly Penn, a young heiress whom he encounters in robbing her house, and who eventually will die young and