In “Weathering the Books,” her survey of personal reading history, Rebecca Martin surmises that for her “reading is seasonal…intensely seasonal.”
She goes on:
Don’t you know December is for dark fantasy and Victorian novels? The likes of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Jane Eyre, Bleak House. Fall is for The Fellowship of the Ring — at least the pre-Bree bit, every year. Spring is for landscape prose: Annie Dillard, Wendell Berry. Mostly stuff about Appalachia, farming, and the local hills, including that long, straight laundry-line that is Dillard’s Tinker Mountain thirty minutes up the road. Late winter and mid-summer and all the gaps between are for Young Adult fiction . . . so really, there may never be a time for Catcher. I am selective. Selective and seasonal.
Stealing a bit of my discussion question thunder, she asks: “Does anyone else read this way, too? And why?”
I’ll start: I tend to read fiction during the summer and any new book I’ve really wanted to read. During the winter the stuck-in-a-cabin feeling pushes me toward deeply spiritual books, theology and old books. The spring and fall are a mix of both, depending on how cold it is. There is something immensely satisfying about reading a novel on the beach or at a mountain house during the summer. And during the winter, there is no better contentment for me than to spend long hours drinking tea and pouring myself into thought once the sun sets at five o’clock.
So how about you? How do you read seasonally and why?
