The Gift of Reading

Some people in our mountains view winter as a prison without walls. They hunker down with soups and other comfort food, and their spirits turn as bare as the leafless oak in the backyard. 

They may liven up around the holidays only to spend January and February bemoaning the drab evenings, icy winds, gray rains, and inconvenient snow. They spend the last weeks of February staring out their windows, dreaming of an early spring.

Others rejoice in the plummeting temperatures. They hike lonely mountain trails free of mosquitoes or gnats, delighting in vistas usually hidden by summer foliage. They flock to ski resorts. They even relish their indoor incarceration, listening to the blasts of wind rolling down the hills and through the valleys, watching basketball on their television sets, and snuggling into sleep beneath blankets and quilts.

Then there are the readers. They may belong to either group, but winter nights often find them curled up under an afghan on a sofa, absorbed by a book and with a drink—hot chocolate, herbal tea, whiskey, a glass of red wine—on an end table. Whether they despise or adore winter is immaterial. What readers know is that winter, particularly its dark, cold evenings, is ready-made for sinking into a book. 

Given the holidays that occur in these months, readers also delight in selecting books to share with others. Below is a grab-bag of such books, a selection designed for gift giving, amusement, and edification.

Michael Beadle’s Images of America: Canton and Images of America: Haywood County (Arcadia Publishing, 2013 and 2010, $22 apiece) feature scores of black-and-white photographs along with a brief commentary on each picture. Poet, editor, and author of Haywood County: Portrait of a Mountain Community, Beadle does a fine job putting these two books together. Interested readers will find their own counties and communities included in this same series.

For travel lovers confined by snow and ice to fireside and sofa, Travel North Carolina: Going Native in the Old North State (John F. Blair, 4th edition) provides an antidote to winter blues. Here Carolyn Sakowski, Sue Clark, Angela Harwood, Steve Kirk, Artie Sparrow, and Anne Holcomb Waters, all natives or longtime residents, take readers on a tour of the state from the mountains to the sea. Blair Publishers is known for its travel books, and Travel North Carolina is one of its best publications. 

Moving closer to home, Marla Hardee Milling’s Only In Asheville: An Eclectic History (History Press, 2015, $20) zeros in on the city’s last 40 years. Milling gives us a sense of why Asheville today is known both as the “Paris of the South” and “the freak capital of the United States” (Rolling Stone Magazine), but what’s really fascinating about this book is the story of Asheville’s comeback from its demise beginning in the 1960s. Anyone who visited downtown Asheville 30 years ago will recall a dirty city of broken windows, shuttered buildings, and empty sidewalks. Milling shows us how daring entrepreneurs and people such as former mayor Lou Bissette Jr. and Julian Price—who pumped $15 million of his own into the city—transformed Asheville from a desert into an oasis. Milling also includes photos and brief biographies of artists and eccentrics who today contribute to this thriving mountain community.

In Beer Lover’s the Carolinas: Best Breweries, Brewpubs & Beer Bars (Globe Pequot Press, 2014, $20), Daniel Hartis reveals another facet to Asheville as he touts the city as the heart of the Carolina brewing industry. North Carolina, Hartis points out, boasts more breweries than any other Southern state, and South Carolina is now booming as well with brewpubs and small breweries. In addition to city-by-city reviews of various breweries, Hartis also gives readers a guide to brewpub walks, a list of beer festivals, a review of up-and-coming breweries, and even a chapter on where to buy supplies for brewing your own beer. Beer Lover’s the Carolinas is loaded with maps and photographs and should appeal to suds lovers throughout these two states.

Finally, those seeking a little suspense during winter’s gray days may want to turn to William Forstchen’s One Year After (Forge Books, 2015, $26). Forstchen, who lives in Black Mountain and teaches at Montreat College, is the author of One Second After, a best-selling novel set in Black Mountain in the aftermath of an electro-magnetic explosion that brings America to its knees. In One Year After, Forstchen returns to these characters to give us a look at how the people of Black Mountain are surviving. Led by John Matherson, an ex-Marine and history teacher at the college, the town has survived assaults from illness and marauders, but now it faces a greater threat from a mysterious government and a “federal administrator.”