I'm rereading The Long Goodbye. This is the fourth time, or maybe the fifth. I lost count somewhere in college, when I read it in a week I was supposed to be reading something else for a seminar and wrote the seminar paper on it instead. I got a B. The professor said I seemed more interested in the detective than in the argument, which was true, and which I still don't think was a flaw.

I first read Chandler from my mother's shelves. She was a school librarian, and the house I grew up in has more books than walls to put them on. The mysteries lived in the den, alphabetical by author, and somewhere around fourteen I worked my way from Allingham to Chandler and stopped there for most of a year. The copy I read had a cracked spine and her name inside the cover in pencil. I asked her once if I could keep it. She said I could borrow it as long as I liked, which is a librarian's way of saying no.

What I loved then was the voice. Nobody in my life talked like Philip Marlowe, and nobody I've met since does either, which is probably for the best. Chandler wrote similes the way other people breathe. The famous one is from Farewell, My Lovely, about a blonde who could make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window, and every reader of his has a favorite of their own. At fourteen I copied them into a notebook. I tried to use one in an English essay and was asked to see the teacher afterward.

What I love now is something else. Marlowe is decent. That sounds like faint praise, and it isn't. In The Long Goodbye he takes a liking to a charming drunk named Terry Lennox, for no reason he can fully explain, and he stays loyal to him when it costs him everything a man like that has to lose: money, sleep, a few days in a cell rather than tell the police what he knows. He isn't a good man in any way the people around him would recognize. He drinks too much and talks back to everyone. But he can't be bought, he doesn't lie to the people who trust him, and when the job is over he goes home alone and plays chess against a book of famous games. Chandler wrote in an essay that down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean. I didn't understand that at fourteen. I think I do now.

There's a loneliness to him that I missed the first time, too. The book is long and slow in places, and Chandler knew it. He was writing it while his wife was dying, and you can feel it in the long middle, in the way Marlowe keeps returning to people who have already let him down. It's a book about friendship, and about what you owe a friend who turns out not to deserve it.

I write for a living now, and I've noticed that I reread differently. I see the scaffolding. I see where he needed to get a character from one room to another and didn't care how. I see a scene that goes on three pages too long because he was enjoying himself. And then a line comes along that's so exactly right that I put the book down on my chest and look at the ceiling for a while, and I forget about the scaffolding entirely.

Is there a book you go back to that reads differently each time?

I grew up in Duluth, where snow is not news. It arrives in November, settles in like a relative, and leaves sometime around Easter if you're lucky. Nobody cancels anything for it. My mother drove to work through winters that would shut this city down for a month, and the only time I remember school closing, it was for cold, not snow, and we went sledding anyway.

So when the first flakes came down last Sunday and my phone started buzzing with warnings, I was smug about it. I called my mother to be smug together. She asked how many inches, and when I told her, there was a pause long enough to fit the whole of Lake Superior in it.

I am less smug now. Not because of the snow, which is a few inches with ambitions, but because of what Seattle does with it. This city doesn't fight snow. It stops.

The studio sent a note on Friday afternoon telling us not to come in, and by Friday night my street had gone quiet in a way I've never heard it. No buses grinding up the hill. No one leaning on a horn. Just people walking down the middle of the road, because there was nowhere else to walk and nothing coming. On Saturday morning a man went past my building on cross-country skis, very slowly, with enormous dignity. An hour later two kids came down the same hill on the lid of a plastic storage box, and their father came after them on a baking sheet and was louder than both of them put together.

In Duluth we'd have had the walk shoveled by seven and gone to work. Here, nobody owns a shovel. My neighbor downstairs cleared the front steps with a dustpan and a spatula, and when I came down in my good boots with my real shovel, which my mother made me bring when I moved and which I have been mocked for ever since, she looked at it the way you'd look at a fire truck. I did the steps, the walk and half the block. I have never been so popular in my life.

The grocery store on the corner ran out of bread and milk by Saturday noon, which I expected, and out of frozen peas, which I still can't explain.

Here's the thing I didn't expect. I like it. I like a city that looks at four inches of snow and decides, all together, that nothing today is as important as being outside in it. People said hello to me who have walked past me for five years. Someone built a snowman in the park with a traffic cone for a hat. I took the long way to the store for no reason at all, which in Duluth in February would get you a look from everyone you passed.

They say there's more coming tomorrow. The studio has already said to stay home. I've got soup on and a mystery I've been saving, and my shovel is by the door, where everyone on this block now knows to find it.

Where you live, does the snow stop things, or do you shovel and go?

A list I had to work for this year, for a reason anyone who was reading here in the summer will understand. Between the end of May and the middle of August I read nothing but bug reports. The rest of the year I tried to make up for it.

• Brat Farrar, Josephine Tey. On Ruth Ann's advice, from the comments on last year's list. A young man turns up claiming to be the heir who was thought drowned as a boy, and the whole family has to decide whether to believe him. I couldn't put it down, and then I couldn't stop thinking about it.
• The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin. I read it in February, after she died. An envoy on a planet locked in winter, and the long crossing of the ice near the end, two people hauling a sled and learning, slowly, to trust each other. It's the best book about cold I've read, and I grew up in Duluth.
• The Tombs of Atuan, Ursula K. Le Guin. A reread. A girl whose name has been taken from her, in the dark under a desert temple. I understood it far better as a grown woman than I did at twelve.
• A Fatal Grace and The Cruelest Month, Louise Penny. Two more from that village in Quebec, read in order, of course. I was trying to keep pace with my mother. I failed.
• Educated, Tara Westover. A memoir of growing up in the mountains in Idaho, with no school and a family that didn't believe in hospitals. I read it in one weekend and called my mother afterward for no particular reason.
• Circe, Madeline Miller. The witch from the Odyssey, finally telling it her way. Quiet and furious at once.
• Transcription, Kate Atkinson. A young woman in 1940 typing up secretly recorded conversations for MI5, and what it costs her years later. Funny until it isn't.
• The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett. My first Hammett, which is embarrassing to admit for someone who has read as much Chandler as I have. Sam Spade is colder than Marlowe and doesn't pretend otherwise. I see now where a great many people learned to write a private eye.
• Farewell, My Lovely, Raymond Chandler. My yearly reread, a different one this time. Moose Malloy in a nightclub looking for a woman who doesn't want to be found.
• The Witch Elm, Tana French. Her first novel outside the murder squad, about a man who has always been lucky and then isn't. Long and unnerving. I read the last hundred pages in one sitting on a Sunday and missed lunch.

Eleven, counting the two Pennys separately, which I'm going to do.

What should I read next year? I'm asking for real. Last year's comments gave me the best book on this list.

For about a year now I've been going to a board game night with people from work. Thursdays, at a different apartment each week, whoever has the biggest table and the most patient neighbors. There are usually six or seven of us. Someone brings chips, someone brings something they baked to prove a point, and there's a rule that nobody talks about work after the first hour, which we break within the first ten minutes.

We play whatever someone brings. Long games of building railroads across a map of the country. Fast word games where one person gives clues and everyone else shouts. A cooperative game about curing diseases that we have lost, as a group, more often than seems statistically possible. It's the one evening of the week where I'm not responsible for whether anything is good.

Owen started coming in the spring. I've known him a couple of years from work, where he keeps the servers standing up, which is a job nobody notices until something goes wrong and nobody thanks him for when it doesn't. We met arguing in a hallway about something that was neither of our departments, and we've kept that up ever since, in hallways, kitchens and once in a stairwell during a fire drill.

At game night, Owen reads the rules. All of them. He reads the rulebook front to back before anyone may touch a piece, and then he plays by it exactly as written. Not as remembered, not as it's always been played at someone's parents' house, and never as it would be more fun. House rules he treats like a bug report. If a rule is bad, he says, the thing to do is play it as written and find out why it's bad, and only then decide.

This produces arguments. Two weeks ago we spent forty minutes on whether "adjacent" included diagonally adjacent. He was right. It didn't. It was in the glossary, on the last page, in small print, and nobody spoke to him for a full round. Once, when a rulebook really was ambiguous, he wrote to the publisher in Germany. They wrote back. He printed their answer and keeps it folded in the box.

I'm the opposite. I'm a writer, and I believe in the spirit of a thing. I think the rules are the floor, and the game is what people do on top of them. Owen thinks the rules are the game, and everything else is people cheating politely. We've had that argument at least once a week since April. Neither of us has budged an inch, and I've started to suspect we both enjoy it more than the games.

He is also very good at the word game where you give one-word clues, in a way that's slightly alarming. His clues are perfectly logical and nobody else gets them. He wins anyway.

Are you a letter-of-the-rules person or a spirit-of-the-rules person? Be honest.

I took the ferry to Bainbridge today, by myself, which is something I do about once a season when I need to be somewhere that isn't anywhere in particular.

You walk on at Colman Dock downtown. You pay on the way over and ride back for free, which I've always found philosophically interesting. Then it's about half an hour across the water. I sit outside on the top deck until the cold gets the better of me, then inside by a window among the people doing crosswords. On a Saturday it's families with bicycles, couples visiting the island for lunch, and a few men who have clearly made this crossing every weekday for twenty years and are asleep before we've left the dock.

On the island I walk up the hill into Winslow, go into the bookshop, buy a book I don't need, eat a bowl of soup, and walk back down. It takes maybe three hours. Nobody knows where I am. I don't mean that dramatically. I mean it's the one afternoon in a season when nobody could reach me if they tried, because my phone is in my bag and my bag is under the bench, and that seems to me, more and more, worth the fare.

The ride back is what I go for. The boat comes around, and the whole city is in front of you at once, the towers and the hills and the Needle, small as a toy, the lights coming on floor by floor. From the water, at that distance, it looks like something people built on purpose. Which it is, I suppose. It's hard to remember that from inside it.