Southern Indiana winters aren’t dramatic the way people picture Midwest winters, we don’t get the lake-effect snow towns two states north of us get, mostly it’s grey and cold and wet in a way that doesn’t photograph well and doesn’t end quickly. It’s not the kind of weather that makes for a good story. It’s the kind that just sits on a place for four months and waits you out.

What it does, reliably, every year, without fail, is triple our hold requests starting right around the second week of January. I used to think this was a coincidence, a few slow news weeks meaning more people had time to read, until I actually looked at years of the numbers on my own initiative, which is the kind of thing you do when you’ve worked reference long enough that pattern recognition becomes a compulsion, and it isn’t a coincidence, it’s the same curve every single year, holds up, foot traffic down, exactly the months when walking to the library feels like the least appealing errand on anyone’s list.

I’ve started timing my own reading around it without quite meaning to. The heavier books, the ones I’ve been circling for a while and not committing to, somehow always end up getting picked up in the dead of winter, not because I plan it that way but because there’s something about being stuck inside that makes a five-hundred-page oral history feel like the right size for the season instead of an intimidating one. More than one of the denser things I’ve reviewed here started as exactly that kind of winter pickup, though I don’t love what that says about my own mood in the darkest months of the year.

I also game less in the winter, not because anyone in my group minds the cold, we’re all adults who own coats, but because the drive to whoever’s hosting that week gets less appealing once the roads turn to slush, and a couple of our regular nights have just quietly turned into rescheduled nights instead. My own group has an unspoken rule now that we don’t take a cancelled January session personally, it’s not about anyone, it’s just what the season does to everyone’s willingness to leave the house.

I complain about the greyness every year like it’s new information. It isn’t. But so is the reading, so I suppose it evens out.