When it's cold outside all you really want to do is sit inside and never go outside until spring comes. When you're stuck inside you're going to need something to do so I have book recommendations that will help you survive the colder months.

1. I Am Malala

Written by: Malala Yousafzai and Christina Lamb

When the Taliban took control of the Swat Valley in Pakistan, one girl spoke out. Malala Yousafzai refused to be silenced and fought for her right to an education. In October 2012, when she was fifteen, Malala almost paid the ultimate price. She was shot in the head while riding the bus home from school, and few expected her to survive. Instead, Malala's heroic recovery has taken her on an extraordinary journey from a remote valley in northern Pakistan to the halls of the United Nations in New York. At sixteen, she emerged as a global symbol of peaceful protest. A year later she became the youngest recipient ever of the Nobel Peace Prize. Hailed by the Associated Press for its "arresting detail," I Am Malala will make readers believe in the power of one person's voice to inspire change in the world.

2. Their Hands Were Watching God

Written by: Zora Neale Hurston

One of the most important works of twentieth-century American literature, Zora Neale Hurtson's beloved 1937 classic, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is an enduring Southern love story sparkling with wit, beauty, and heartfelt wisdom. Told in the captivating voice of a woman who refuses to believe in sorrow, bitterness, fear, or foolish romantic dreams, is is the story of fair-skinned, fiercely independent Janie Crawford, and her evolving selfhood through three marriages and a life marked by poverty, trials, and purpose. A true literary wonder, Hurston's masterwork remains as relevant and affecting today as when it was first published - perhaps the most widely read and highly regarded novel in the entire canon of African American literature.

3. The Little Paris Bookshop

Written by: Nina George

Monsieur Perdu calls himself a literary apothecary. From his floating bookstore in a barge on the Seine, he prescribes novels for the hardships of life. Using his intuitive feel for the exact book a reader needs, Perdu mends broken hearts and souls. The only person he can't seem to heal through literature is himself; he's still haunted by heartbreak after his great love disappeared. She left with only a letter that he has never opened.

After Perdu is finally tempted to read the letter, he hauls anchor and departs on a mission to the south of France, hoping to make peace with his loss and discover the end of the story. Joined by a bestselling but blocked author and a lovelorn Italian chef, Perdu travels along the country's rivers, dispensing his wisdom and his books and showing that the literary world can take the human soul on a journey to heal itself.

Internationally bestselling and filled with warmth and adventure, The Little Paris Bookshop is a love letter to books, meant for anyone who believes in the power of stories to shape people's lives.

4. String Theory

Written by: Jenny Yang Cropp

String Theory is a book of searching. "Looking for the m attached to other," these poems strive to conjure up what has been lost: a mother, a sister, past histories that might take on "mass and weight instead of bells and wings." But there is no nostalgia in the elegies. Even at their most harrowing, these are poems of open-eyes witness, echoing a mother who, making kimchi, knows "to stuff the jar / quietly, and not to flinch." The reward for these excavations, uncompromising in their vulnerability, is the discovery of vibrations that resonate between past and present, as "my mother's missing breast / hums back into existence as my own," revealing that "the universe / is again a moving, breathing thing." What comes through above all is Jenny Yang Cropp's clear, strong voice, as it "leans in / to tell me the thing she's not supposed to talk about."

- Timothy Yu, Author of 100 Chinese Silences & Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1965

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