MacFarlane can write!
I just picked up a copy of The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert MacFarlance. The first sentences in this book are double plus super good.
Two days short of the winter solstice; the turn of the year’s tide. All that cold day, the city and the countryside around felt halted, paused. Five degrees below freezing and the earth battened down. Clouds held snow that would not fall. […] Then just before dusk the snow came – dropping straight for five hours and settling at a steady inch an hour. […] The snow was sinking through the orange cone cast by a street light, the fat flakes showing like furnace sparks.
Wow.