After Christmas is over, and the sunrises start getting earlier and the sunsets later in the Northern Hemisphere, there are still two months of scarce daylight and lowering skies ahead. Here’s a suggestion for how to fill the gloomy hours with uplift: read.

Read some great books, returning perhaps to those you ploughed through on school assignments so many years ago. Discover one of the pleasures of aging — how serious books turn out to be more interesting and enriching than what you remember from dutifully ploughing through them years ago.

Sit in a comfortable chair, turn off the television, remove distracting earbuds, leave your smartphones and tablets charging quietly on a desk, and resist the temptation to check your messages one more time. Open up a book and give yourself uninterrupted hours to become immersed in a world created by a great writer many years ago.

I’ve been following this advice the last couple of winters, after I started reflecting on how, despite being in two serious book groups, I was spending too much time reading ephemeral stuff and wasn’t reading anything serious beyond some excellent book group selections. I decided to concentrate my reading on weekends, spending long hours interrupted by little but leg-stretching and........

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