Last winter, when I found myself in that cold, dark place that comes after the spell of the holidays but before spring reveals itself, I began reading Tolstoy.

I found it comforting to send my mind to a snowy 19th-century Russia, complete with ice skating and fur coats and family arriving by train. I sunk easily into their slow mornings of drinking coffee while reading the newspaper and their after-dinner cigars. I was reading “Anna Karenina,” and its icy exterior was warming my heart.

It got me thinking about its antithesis: summer book-list drops comprised of beach reads and romantic fantasies and otherwise fast-moving novels that can be read start to finish in one lazy afternoon.

But what happens when it’s a different everyday reality we want to escape or embrace? What about the gray days of January or the “wintry mix” afternoons, when you want to check out, take a personal day, and tuck yourself under blankets with a cup of hot tea?

What should you reach for when you are face to face with SAD or having another existential crisis and don’t want to get out of bed? What book will you pull from the shelf when it’s March but still bitter cold and dreary?

I would like to suggest a few titles. Themes of death, depression and snowy, icy locales (most often Russia) continually resurface.

FICTION

“Anna Karenina” by Leo Tolstoy

The famous line “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” is the first sentence of this novel and certainly sets the tone. As mentioned earlier, read it for its atmosphere, themes and setting — heavy snow, sleigh rides, and intimate indoor scenes resonate perfectly with the season.

“The Brothers Karamazov” by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Russia (again), plus murder and religion make this a perfect read for long, dark nights. This sprawling philosophical novel traces three brothers — sensualist Dmitri, intellectual Ivan and spiritual Alyosha — as they grapple with their father’s murder and the weightier questions of faith, free will and moral responsibility. Dostoevsky examines whether meaning can exist without God, whether love can redeem suffering, and how each soul must reconcile the divine and demonic within itself.

“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn distills the entire Gulag experience into a single winter day in the life of prisoner Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, revealing how survival itself becomes an art of small dignities and negotiations. Mundane details — securing extra bread, hiding a blade, finding warmth — carry profound weight. They show how resilient the human spirit is.

“Doctor Zhivago” by Boris Pasternak

I read this in college, then watched the movie, and still think of it every winter — because it is just so wintry (Russian writers are really are the kings of winter reading.)

“The Winter of our Discontent” by John Steinbeck

This feels like a fitting winter read for the state our country is in, as it follows a once-wealthy man who has been reduced to a grocery store clerk. He confronts the moral decay beneath America’s material prosperity, while wrestling with temptation, corruption and the erosion of values. The book asks: Can integrity survive in a culture that worships material success?

“The Hours” by Michael Cunningham

Three women across different decades—Virginia Woolf writing “Mrs. Dalloway,” a 1940s housewife reading it and a modern editor living it — move through parallel stories, through the hours of their lives. Or watch the (terrific) 2002 movie starring Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore