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If the weather outside is frightful, why not read? Credit...Timothy A. Clary/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By Leah Greenblatt

Leah Greenblatt is a writer and critic living in Brooklyn. Her most recent review for the Book Review was of “The Woman in Me,” by Britney Spears.

Dear readers,

In general, I love the festive, frantic busyness of December — all those windblown and perennially overcommitted New Yorkers careening toward the holidays and the fresh calendar year waiting just beyond with bells on. It’s also my birthday month; a celebration to squeeze in between a thousand other shiny, convivial things. Two years ago, though, my annual senescence landed in the midst of the grimmest kind of literary hat trick: first the death of bell hooks on Dec. 15, followed two days later by Eve Babitz, and then just before Christmas the final blow, Joan Didion.

Which is not to say their lives were somehow misbegotten or cut tragically short; we should all be so lucky to straddle two centuries with such achievements and exit covered in glory. The ache I felt at their collective passing was more ordinary sadness mixed with a sort of existential envy: Forget the navel-gazing Substacks and teapot social-media squabbles of contemporary lit — would there ever be writers like that again who really lived? Give me earthquakes in El Salvador and naked chess with famed French Dadaists! Let me disrupt academia, feminism and even grammar like an absolute boss!