Midwinter is a great time to catch up on your reading; shorter days mean less time outside, and what could be better than curling up in your favorite chair with a mug of hot tea and a blanket across your knees?

Reading is recession-friendly too as great books are plentifully available for very low cost on Amazon (check Sales and the Used sections), at second-hand bookstores, and for free at your local library (what could be more eco-friendly than sharing?).

While there are over a hundred must-read nonfiction books about the environment, fiction writers have also tackled environmental themes in all sorts of creative ways. Here are five great novels to choose from:

The Return of the Native, by Thomas Hardy

Hardy's sixth novel is a classroom classic, probably because it's main action involves a steamy love triangle-plus-two between a wild woman, a traditional woman, an itinerant trader with impeccable ethics, a confused lover and a very confused son. But behind the completely engaging romantic entanglements and disentanglements is a love story of a different kind. Egdon Heath, modelled after the very real Studland Heath in Dorset, England is drawn by Hardy throughout the novel as more than just a place in which the action takes place. It is a character on its own, and the dependence on the local environment affects everything from when and if the lovers will meet to precipitating the deaths of several. More than descriptions of weather events and landscapes, Hardy plants the Heath in the middle of all the drama of the story, and a reader paying attention to more than just the lusty action will learn much about rural people's relationship to their local ecosystem in Britain in the mid-1800's.

The Poisonwood Bible

by Barbara Kingsolver

Kingsolver is probably most well-known for this novel, about a missionary family struggling to make it in the Belgian Congo in the late 1950s; like T.C. Boyle, most of Kingsolver's books have environmental themes and nature is painted with her resplendent prose and lush description of landscapes some of us will never get to know. It is narrated by the four daughters and wife of the missionary husband who brings them to this land far from their Georgian home. Kingsolver's latest book, The Lacuna  was published in late 2009.

 

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

The 2003 novel has oft been categorized as scifi, but author Margaret Atwood has disputed that characterization, and prefers to call it speculative fiction (because, she argues, no new technology was invented by her, only existed technologies extrapolated upon). Regardless of what type of fictional category a reader would put the book into, it is certainly a darker world than the one we live in now. Taking on the concepts of genetic engineering, animal extinction (one of the games played by the main characters involves recalling animals that are no longer), corporatism, vegetarianism, and capitalism, Atwood also keeps a compelling story going, in which friend is pitted against friend, alliances are tested and broken, and murder and mayhem ensue. Atwood's latest book, which debuted late in 2009, titled The Year of the Flood, includes many of the same characters as Oryx and Crake, and is set in the same time period.

Drop City by T.C. Boyle

T.C. Boyle returns to environmental themes again and again in his novels, now numbering twenty. Drop City focuses on utopianism's successes and failures. Set in Alaska, two groups of young people live in close proximity and  have similar ideals, but totally different ways of going about achieving them. There are 'back-to-the-landers' who are prepared to live the tough rural life that an Alaskan winter throws at them. On the other side of the river live the Hippies of Drop City" who want to "...live like Daniel Boone, live like the original hippies, like our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers -- off the land, man, doing your own thing, no apologies." The conflicts between these two groups are significant, and fascinating studies in human approaches to both living together and in harmony (or trying to) with their environment.

Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn

Ishmael is an unusual book, in that while it's definitely  a work of fiction (the primary dialog occurs between a man and a talking gorilla), it sometimes reads more like a philosophical tract - albeit a very accessible one. The 1992 book is summed up well here: "...it examines mythology, its effect on ethics, and how that relates to sustainability." Primarily looking at how the human race understands itself and it's effect on the planet as part of a cultural myth, this big-idea novel could have been written in a way that would be off-putting to most, but the truly fun to read and thoughtful dialog between a teacher and his pupil (the man and gorilla mentioned above) is easily understandable to even younger readers (junior high school and older). Ishmael is the first in a trilogy that's followed by My Ishmael and The Story of B.