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.