LEICESTER, Mass. — I have to finally admit it, winter is here. In the interest of embracing the season, here is a list of good books featuring cold climates, winter activities, holidays, and other things that make me think of winter.

Faceless Killers: The First Kurt Wallander Mystery by Henning Mankell

You’ve read the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, what’s next in Swedish fiction? Henning Mankell. This is the first in a series of police procedural mystery novels in English featuring Kurt Wallander. He’s got everything a detective needs: a seemingly unsolvable crime, a personal life in shambles, a unique perspective on the world around
him, and the determination to stick with it, to solve the crime, even when it seems impossible.

For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink and
Changed History by Sara Rose

In the dramatic story of one of the greatest acts of corporate espionage ever committed,
Sarah Rose recounts the fascinating, unlikely circumstances surrounding a turning point in economic history. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the British East India Company faced the loss of its monopoly on the fantastically lucrative tea trade with China, forcing it to make the drastic decision of sending Scottish botanist Robert Fortune to steal the crop from deep within China and bring it back to British plantations in India. Like a secret agent, Fortune disguises himself as a native Chinese, travels deep into china, seeking the secret to tea. His danger-filled odyssey, magnificently recounted here, reads like adventure fiction, revealing a long-forgotten chapter of the past and the wondrous origins of a seemingly ordinary beverage. Knowing a bit of the story behind your warm cup of tea on a cold winter day will enrich the experience.

The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder

We all know Little House on the Prairie, but this particular volume details Pa, Ma, Laura, Mary, Carrie, and little Grace bravely face the hard winter of 1880-81 in their little house in the Dakota Territory. The family actually moves from their farm to town to weather the winter. As blizzards cover the little town with snow, cutting off all supplies from the
outside, life gets a little bit harder, and the world gets a little bit smaller. Soon there is
almost no food left, so young Almanzo Wilder and a friend make a dangerous trip across
the prairie to find some wheat. Finally a joyous Christmas is celebrated in a very unusual
way. This book is perfect for families and readers who like suspense and challenge, but
little death, destruction and suffering – the hardship is well tempered by the fact that we
all know each of our favorite characters survive.

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan

It's a fascinating journey up and down the food chain, one that might change the way you read the label on a frozen dinner, dig into a steak or decide whether to buy organic eggs. You'll certainly never look at a Chicken McNugget the same way again. Pollan's
narrative strategy is simple: he traces four meals back to their origins. He starts with a
McDonald's lunch, which he and his family gobble up in their car. Surprise: the origin
of this meal is a cornfield in Iowa.

One of the many eye-openers in the book is the prevalence of corn in the American diet; of the 45,000 items in a supermarket, more than a quarter contain corn. Later, Pollan prepares a dinner with items from Whole Foods, investigating the flaws in the world of "big organic"; cooks a meal with ingredients from a small, utopian Virginia farm; and assembles a feast from things he's foraged and hunted. This may sound earnest, but Pollan isn't preachy: he's too thoughtful a writer, and too much of a researcher, to let ideology take over. He's also funny and adventurous.

He bounces around on an old International Harvester tractor, gets down on his belly to
examine a pasture from a cow's-eye view, shoots a wild pig and otherwise throws himself into the making of his meals. As we focus on big meals with family over the holidays, this thoughtful book focuses on food in general, and a meal Pollan prepares specifically, so it seems particularly poignant.

The Man in the Ice: The Discovery of a 5,000-Year-Old Body Reveals the Secrets of the Stone Age by Konrad Spindler

In 1991, a couple from Nuremberg, Germany, vacationing in the Austrian Alps made a
sensational discovery-a mummified, well-preserved body, half emerged from a glacier,
which turned out to be the corpse of a 5300-year-old Neolithic man, fully equipped with
ax, flint dagger, bow and arrows, wooden stave and belt-pouch. Dubbed "the Iceman,"
he had charcoal tattoos on his legs and feet and a traveling medicine kit-pieces of birch
fungus known to contain a natural antibiotic substance highly active against deadly
bacteria. His clothes-cap, leggings, fur poncho, loincloth, shoes, grass cloak-comprise the most ancient complete set of garments found in Europe. In an astonishing, exhaustively detailed report (with 32 color photos), which reads like a forensic mystery, Spindler, the Austrian archeologist who led the investigation, reconstructs efforts to identify this prehistoric hunter's native village, culture and cause of death. A surprising picture emerges of Neolithic folk medicine, farming, stockbreeding and culture.

Don’t know what to read next? Ask for these books, or books on any topic you might
find interesting, at your local library.