Reading + Reflection Guide: How To Winter
Whether you're in the midst of winter or experiencing a season of challenge in a different way, this book provides tools and insights to help. It's also our first book club pick of 2026!
If you were to describe winter in just a few words, which words would you choose?
How about words that describe how you tend to feel during winter?
For some, winter may quickly bring to mind shorter periods of daylight, colder temperatures, slippery roads and walking paths, grayish-brown landscapes, or travel delays and changes in plans due to weather. Many find it’s dark when they leave for work in the morning and dark when they’re heading home. One friend recently shared how she’s often seeking out her pajamas by 5pm this time of year.
If this sounds familiar, or if winter isn’t necessarily your favorite, Kari Leibowitz is here to help. Her exploration began with curiosity around how people who live in the world’s coldest, darkest places - like cities north of the Arctic Circle, where two months without sunlight each year is the norm - managed through such challenge.
What she discovered, however, is that not only do those folks manage through those cold and dark seasons, they often tend to thrive. She then began her extensive research into how they do it and published her results in the outstanding book, How To Winter, to help us all find ways to thrive.
“Our mindsets shape our attention,” Leibowitz shares, reminding us that if we write off winter - essentially three months of every twelve - as simply a dreadful season to ‘get through,’ that is actually a big portion of our lives! It may benefit us to learn skills, ideas, and strategies that can equip us to flourish instead, which is exactly what this book aims to do.
How To Winter provides a blend of stories, cultures, science, and research to help us thrive not only in nature’s season of winter, but also in times of our own ‘personal winter’ - those ‘cold, dark, or difficult days,’ as the subtitle suggests. I first read this book a year ago and have come back to its ideas and resources multiple times since then, in various seasons of the year and of my life. Now I can’t wait to discuss it in our first Reading And Purpose Nonfiction Book Club meetings of the year!
Below I have included our Reflection + Reading Guide, filled with prompts and questions to consider while or after you read, and which can also serve as a launchpad for our book club discussions. I have also curated several additional recommended titles if you’d like to delve further into the subject matter, as well as various podcast episodes, videos, and online resources to help you make winter - and other seasons as well - positive and purposeful!
As you can see, I have tabbed more than a few points in my copy, and I can’t wait to discuss these with you later this month!
Enjoy the tools and resources below, and I look forward to our upcoming discussions!