Charlene D’Avanzo: As the days grow cooler and shorten we Mainers all know what’s coming. Despair not! Instead, here are a few books that will help us celebrate inevitable wintery worlds:

The Sun is a Compass: A 4,000-Mile Journey into the Alaskan Wilds by Caroline Van Hemert: A biologist’s gripping tale of a human-powered journey from the Pacific Northwest to the Arctic to rediscover her love of birds, nature, and adventure.

Guided by birds, an ornithologist and her husband follow the trails of animals on a 4,000-mile rowboat, ski, foot, raft, and canoe journey from the Pacific rainforest to the Alaskan Arctic.

This Much Country by Kristin Knight Pace: A memoir of heartbreak, thousand-mile races, the endless Alaskan wilderness and many, many dogs from one of only a handful of women to have completed both the Yukon Quest and the Iditarod.

In 2009, after a crippling divorce that left her heartbroken and directionless, Kristin decided to accept an offer to live at a friend’s cabin outside of Denali National Park in Alaska for a few months. In exchange for housing, she would take care of her friend’s eight sled dogs.

That winter, she learned that she was tougher than she ever knew.

Braving It: A Father, a Daughter, and an Unforgettable Journey into the Alaska Wild: A powerful story of a father’s journey with his teenage daughter to the far reaches of Alaska.

Home to only a handful of people, Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is a harsh and lonely place. That’s why James Campbell hesitated to invite his fifteen-year-old daughter, Aidan, to join him.  Would she be able to withstand clouds of mosquitoes, the threat of grizzlies, bathing in an ice-cold river, and hours of grueling labor peeling and hauling logs?

But once there, Aidan embraced the wild. Despite windchills of 50 degrees below zero, father and daughter ventured out daily to track, hunt, and trap. Under the supervision of Edna, Heimo’s Yupik Eskimo wife, Aidan grew more confident in the woods.