What Boise Winters Do to a Reading Habit

I didn’t grow up here. Moved to Boise for the job at the clinic, been here long enough now that I mostly stop noticing the mountains until a clear day catches me off guard on the drive in. But I grew up somewhere warmer, somewhere you could take a book out to a porch pretty much nine months out of the year without a second thought, and I underestimated how much that habit was load bearing until I lost it.

First winter here, I remember being genuinely surprised at how much slower I was getting through books. Took me a while to figure out it wasn’t the books, it was that my whole reading ritual had quietly depended on a porch, actual daylight, a specific chair, none of which transferred to a January where it’s dark by five and the idea of reading outside is a joke for about four months straight. I tried reading by a window instead. Didn’t work the same. Something about the porch specifically, the slight cold, the outside noise, had been doing more work than I gave it credit for.

Took me two winters to actually adjust instead of just complaining about it. What finally worked was leaning into it instead of fighting it, dense stuff for the cold months, things that want a slower pace anyway. That’s roughly when I got into rereading things on purpose instead of treating every book as a one-time pass, Solaris in particular became a January book for me somehow, cold and a little bleak in a way that matches the actual weather outside the window instead of fighting it.

Summers here are the opposite problem now, honestly, too much daylight, too many hours I feel like I should be outside doing something instead of sitting with a book. I’ve made peace with the fact that my reading habit is seasonal now in a way it never used to be. Feels less like a compromise than it did the first year.

What actually tipped me off, that first winter, wasn’t even the slower pace, it was noticing I’d started resenting the books themselves a little, getting irritated at a perfectly fine novel for not holding my attention, when the actual problem was that I was trying to read it standing at the kitchen counter at four in the afternoon because the light was already going and I hadn’t found a replacement for the porch yet. Took me embarrassingly long to separate those two things. A book failing to hold me and a setup failing to hold me are two completely different failures, though for a while I treated them like they were the same thing, and blamed some genuinely good books for my own bad reading conditions.

What finally clicked was accepting that a winter reading ritual couldn’t just be a worse version of the summer one, it had to be its own separate thing built for what winter actually offers, which around here is mostly a lot of dark, quiet hours and not much reason to leave the house. Slower books, ones that don’t punish you for taking three sittings to get through a chapter. That’s when the rereading habit really took root too, if I’m honest, the two things happened close enough together that I’m not sure I can fully separate which one caused the other. A porch summer and a January reread are, it turns out, doing something similar for me, just at completely different speeds.

I mentioned this to my sister once, on one of our video calls, and she said Ohio winters aren’t exactly generous either, though she’s found her own version of the fix, something involving actual daylight lamps and a much more aggressive relationship with hot tea than I’ve ever managed. Different climate, similar problem, apparently. I don’t think this is a Boise thing specifically so much as a losing-your-childhood-ritual thing that just happened to hit me here first.