A Few Notes on Winter Reading
I read more in winter than any other season. There's something about the short days and the particular quality of cold-weather evenings that makes sitting with a book feel less like a choice and more like the natural thing to do. This past winter was a good one for reading — I got through more than I expected and found a handful of books that have genuinely stuck with me.
This isn't a formal review column. These are just brief notes on what I read, what I thought, and whether I'd recommend it. Hopefully something here is useful.
The Rings of Saturn — W.G. Sebald
I came to Sebald embarrassingly late. The Rings of Saturn is structured as an account of a walking tour along the Suffolk coast, but it expands endlessly outward into history, memory, and digression in a way that resists easy description. It's melancholy and erudite and unlike anything I'd read before. If you have patience for a book that wanders — deliberately and beautifully — this is one of the most rewarding reading experiences I've had in years.
Four Thousand Weeks — Oliver Burkeman
A productivity book that argues, essentially, against productivity culture. Burkeman's central contention is that we will never get on top of everything, and that accepting this finitude is the only sane response to it. I found it useful not because it gave me new systems but because it helped me make peace with the absence of a perfect system. Worth reading slowly, with pauses.
The Ministry for the Future — Kim Stanley Robinson
Ambitious and dense — this is a novel about climate change that operates more as a speculative policy document than a conventional narrative. Not everyone's thing, and I'll admit some chapters were harder going than others. But the scope of imagination here is genuinely impressive, and several sections — particularly the opening chapter and a recurring section from the perspective of a CO2 molecule — are extraordinary.
Outline — Rachel Cusk
The first in Cusk's trilogy, and I understand now why people find it divisive. The narrator is deliberately evacuated of traditional characterization — we learn who she is almost entirely through the people she listens to and what they reveal. It's a formally unusual book that requires you to meet it on its own terms. I found it quietly devastating by the end.
A Note on Reading Pace
I started keeping a reading log this year — nothing elaborate, just a note of the date I started and finished each book. It's been more interesting than I expected. I notice that the books I race through aren't always the ones I remember most clearly, and the ones I sit with longest tend to leave the deepest impression. There's something there about pace and attention that probably applies beyond reading, but I'm still working out what exactly.
Up Next
On the pile for the coming months: Marilynne Robinson's Gilead (I know, I know — years late), a reread of Calvino's Invisible Cities, and possibly something I know nothing about yet, which is usually the best kind of find.
If you've read anything worth recommending recently, I'm always glad to hear it.