I love the winter festival season. It makes me smile to see religious and cultural traditions from around the world come together around the shortest, darkest day of the year and celebrate light and hope. I reminds me that no matter what kind of ugliness I see in the headlines, collectively we will rise above. However you celebrate–may the dark days of your winter be lit by hope.

Soon we’ll slip into winter (with apologies to my Southern Hemisphere friends) and into perfectly cozy reading days. Here are just a few favorite books from last year’s reading list:

• The Way Back from Broken, by Amber Keyser
• Castle Hangnail, by Ursula Vernon
• Bryony & Roses, by T. Kingfisher
• How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming, by Mike Brown
• Gulp, by Mary Roach
• Echo, by Pam Munoz Ryan
• When the Wind Blows, by Linda Booth Sweeny
• Thorn, by Intisar Khanani
• The Red Pencil, by Andrea Davis Pinkney
• Unusual Chickens for the Exceptional Poultry Farm, by Kelly Jones
• Roller Girl, by Victoria Jamieson
• Waiting for Winter, by Sebastian Meschenmoser
• enormous smallness: a story of e.e. cummings, by Matthew Burgess
• Water is Water, by Miranda Paul