What Providence Winters Do to a Reading Pace

The workshop is a converted garage, which is great from March through October and genuinely rough by the time real winter sets in here. I can heat it enough to be comfortable standing around, but not enough to do the kind of close, steady-handed work that specimen prep asks for, your fingers get stiff before you notice, and stiff fingers on delicate work is how you ruin something. So every December, without really deciding to, I do less bench work and more reading.

Oh yes, and did I mention it gets genuinely mean out there some weeks, ten below with wind off the bay that makes the walk from the house to the garage feel longer than it is. I’m not complaining exactly. I grew up somewhere with real winters and I’d forgotten how much a season like that reorganizes a person’s whole schedule until I had a workshop whose usable hours depend directly on the thermometer.

What I’ve noticed over a few winters now is that I read differently in December than I do in June. Summer reading for me is faster and more plot-forward, something to pick up for twenty minutes between actual work. Winter reading gets slower and denser, the stuff I’ve been putting off because it asks for real sustained attention, Sebald, the Dawkins book I fought with for two months, whatever’s sitting on the difficult end of the shelf. There’s something about the workshop going quiet and cold that makes we want a book that asks the same kind of patience back.

I used to think of this as losing three or four productive months a year, and in a narrow sense I still do, there’s mount work that just doesn’t happen between December and March that would happen if I had a heated shop. But I’ve stopped resenting it the way I used to. The reading I do in that stretch is some of the best reading I do all year, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. A cold garage forces a kind of stillness a warm one doesn’t, and stillness turns out to be exactly what the harder books want from you anyway.

Providence doesn’t really do a gentle transition into any of this. One week it’s workable out there, the next it isn’t, and I’ve learned to just let the season make that decision instead of fighting it every year.