The winter list: six books for the dark half of the year

01Why the winter list exists at all

The circle nearly came apart in its second January. Everybody was tired, the chosen book was long and grey, three people had colds, and the meeting had four of us in it looking rather sorry for ourselves. What we worked out afterwards was that the problem was not the book but the diet: one demanding novel a month with nothing else alongside it is a thin way to spend the darkest weeks of the year, particularly when it gets dark on the walk home from work.

The winter list is therefore not a syllabus. Nobody is expected to read any of it, let alone all of it, and it never comes up for discussion at the meeting. It exists so that when you cannot face two hundred more pages of the monthly book on a Tuesday evening, there is something waiting that asks less of you and still counts as reading. It runs from the second Thursday of January to the second Thursday of March.

02The six, and what they are for

We aim for variety of demand rather than variety of subject. One long comfortable novel you have read before, because rereading in winter is one of the great cheap pleasures and nobody should have to justify it. One book of ghost stories, for obvious seasonal reasons and because the form is short enough to finish in a single sitting. One volume of letters or diaries, which can be opened anywhere and closed without guilt. One book of poems, kept by the bed rather than in a bag.

Then two wildcards, proposed by whoever feels strongly. This year they were a small book about the building of a canal, which was far better than it sounds, and a natural history of the estuary that runs out east of us, which several people read on the train and reported made the grey water considerably more interesting. The wildcards are where the list earns its keep, because they are the ones nobody would have found alone.

• A reread you already love — no justification required.
• Ghost stories, for the length as much as the chill.
• Letters or diaries, openable at any page.
• Poems by the bed, not in the bag.
• Two wildcards from whoever feels strongly.

03Where the copies come from

Almost everything on the list is old enough to be freely available, which is deliberate. The library on the hill will reserve most of it, the second-hand shop near the station has a shelf of exactly this sort of thing at a few pounds a volume, and several members read on a screen without apology. We have never asked anyone to buy a book, and the one month we accidentally chose something only available new, two people quietly did not come, which taught us a good deal.

There is also a small shelf in the back room where members leave copies they have finished with. It works on no system at all. Books arrive, books leave, and roughly once a year somebody takes the whole lot down, dusts the shelf, and puts back the two-thirds that still look loved. The remainder goes to the charity shop by the crossing, which seems a reasonable end for a book that has done its work.

04What happened when we ran it

The February meeting was the best-attended of the year, which we had not expected and cannot entirely explain. The most repeated remark was that having something undemanding in the bag made the demanding book easier rather than harder, which is the opposite of what one of us had predicted rather loudly in January. Three people finished the ghost stories in a week. Nobody at all read the poems, and we have decided to keep them on the list anyway.

The one change for next year is to start the list in December rather than January. By the time we drew this one up, the worst fortnight had already gone past, and several members said they would have liked it in hand before the shortest day. The notebook now has a reminder on the November page, written in capitals, which is as close to administration as this circle gets and rather more than we usually manage.