Thinking back to the Stone Age of the pre-internet era, some might recall a time when human beings put pen to paper and wrote each other letters. One person who had a special gift for this now-vanishing breed of writing was John Updike. It should come as no surprise: Updike, who died in 2009, was prolific in many genres, writing more than 60 books—novels, collections of short stories and essays and poems, and even children’s books.

Now we have Selected Letters of John Updike (Knopf, Oct. 21), a posthumous treasure trove of missives that date from his youth (“Dear Pop, I hope you’re feeling fine”) to his autumnal years (“Dear David,” he writes New Yorker editor David Remnick after Updike’s cancer diagnosis, “Your beautifully generous and warm letter made me begin to cry, first when my wife read it to me at the hospital over the phone, and now when I can read it holding it in my hand”).

Brimming with wit and joie de vivre and perspicacious accounts of the literary world, this mighty volume—totaling 912 pages—is a winter treat, a satisfyingly chunky book to pore over when cuddled up against the cold. One can imagine a fire crackling in the background as Updike wrote some of the letters in his old colonial house in Massachusetts.

Like all great writers, Updike was a master of observation. It’s a skill that former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith prizes in Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times (Norton, Nov.  18)—another book that’s ideal for cold-weather, contemplative reading. Growing up insecure, Smith writes, “Reading poems allowed me to take notice of things I too often overlooked. Poems slowed down time so that I could observe, reflect, ask, and even muster the urge to assert what I kept bottled up.”

Marie Kondo, famous for her global bestseller, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, has a new book out, Letter From Japan (Crown, Oct. 21), that similarly counsels us to slow down and celebrate, for one, the ephemeral beauty of our surroundings. A long winter, for instance, spells the eventual arrival of cherry blossoms; although they fall after just a couple of weeks, Kondo writes, they “capture both the lush vibrance and fleeting nature of life.” She adds that “the simple act of drinking tea” can help make you more present, “grateful for the things that surround you while living in harmony with them.”

And here’s one more book to take in this season: Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns’ The American Revolution: An Intimate History (Knopf, Nov. 11). Marking the 250th anniversary of the start of the war—and published in tandem with the PBS series of the same name—this gorgeously illustrated volume is filled with many colorful paintings and drawings and new maps. What the series and book set out to do is to dust off the Revolution. Burns writes, “We have protected the Revolution as if it were some delicate archeological relic encased in amber; we seem fearful that the inspiring ideas at its core would be diminished if we examined its events too deeply.” How deeply we examine those events remains to be seen.

John McMurtrie is the nonfiction editor.