If you are anything like me, there are dozens—and dozens and dozens—of unread books lining your shelves. You bought them a month ago, or a year ago, or ten years ago, and when you did, you had every good intention of reading them. Instead they sit there, sad and neglected, inspiring vague feelings of guilt while you keep acquiring new books from the bookstore or library and reading those books.
Hot take: don’t feel guilty about this. Just don’t! I firmly believe that we are meant to read certain books at certain times in our life. A book will call to you when you’re ready for it. The latest and most resonant example of this, for me, has been Wintering by Katherine May.
Over the last few weeks, while reading Wintering, I kept pausing to tell Andrew how much I was loving it. “Of course you are,” he said. “That book is basically Anna-bait.” Well, yes, this is correct. I first heard about Wintering from an interview on the goop podcast in December 2020. I remember listening to Katherine May talk, and thinking to myself: I love this woman, I love her message, and I am going to love this book. So, then: why wait two years? Why not read it right away?
The message of Wintering is a beautiful one. The book is part personal memoir, part spiritual reflection, part literary analysis (see also: Anna-bait). There’s a certain rare breed of academic who possesses, alongside a well-developed capacity for deep reading and intellectual inquiry, the gift of clear and emotionally resonant writing. They can stand back and survey the landscape from a position of scholarly authority without falling victim to academic-ese. I’m thinking of writers like Helen MacDonald or Stephen Greenblatt; or, in this case, Katherine May.
May writes about a year in which many things went wrong. Her husband got sick; she got sick; her son was struggling. There was no resisting it, so she decided to let things fall apart. She writes about what it was like to experience this personal winter: a fallow period, a time of retreat from the world. In the book winter is a metaphor, but it’s also a literal experience. She writes about how the physical quality of winter—darkness, cold, deprivation—can be a severe test of endurance, but also, if we let it, a source of rejuvenation.
In many ways, and for many people, the publication of Wintering was perfectly timed (it came out on November 10, 2020). Surely this is part of why the book sold so many copies! What a relief to read a book that spoke to the loneliness of the dark pandemic times we were all experiencing. Lord knows I was familiar with that loneliness. When I heard May talk about Wintering on that podcast, I knew the feelings she was talking about. And yet: I didn’t reach for the book. I wasn’t ready to go there with her. Not yet.
One thing about me, guys. I don’t like admitting that things aren’t in my control. I’m very stubborn about this. When forces bigger than me cause things to get unpleasant, I tend to cling ever more fiercely to a sense of personal agency. Maybe that sense of agency is real, or maybe it’s an illusion (are we instruments of fate? do we have free will? a topic for another time!), but regardless, that’s what I cling to. I don’t like the feeling of being the victim of my circumstances. When I do start to feel that way, usually something kicks in, some stubbornly optimistic determination, which causes me to push back and declare that I have a plan and I am going to do this and everything will be okay! (See also: “I will treat my bout with Covid as a writing retreat.”)
During the last two pandemic winters, when we were pre-vaccine (2020-2021) or were dealing with Omicron (2021-2022), our collective lives were marked with constraint and constriction. Faced with that, I did what I always seem to do. I would not surrender! I would not accept! I would be stubborn as hell. I would go out, I would see friends, I would leave my apartment, and if this meant freezing my butt off during a walk through the park, or eating rapidly cooling food in a poorly heated shed: so be it. This, my friends, is the price of freedom!
But this winter has been different. Life is calming down. We have so much more control and choice in the day-to-day. The holidays felt normal for the first time since 2019. Freedom is easier to come by. Which means that I felt ready, finally, to actually embrace the winter. It began even before I read the book. In December, after the stimulation of Thanksgiving and then our trip to Mexico City, I felt an increasing desire to stay home. I wanted to be quiet and rest. I wanted to remain inside after the sun went down. I was remembering, in my bones, the immense pleasure of choosing to stay home.
I picked up Wintering in early January. Here was the paragraph that, for some reason, really hit me in the chest:
This week, I braised a hot pot with lamb, carrots, and thyme, and discs of potato on top. I feel as though I’m cooking autumn into my house. I bought a box of delicately bloomed figs in cerise papers and ate them chopped on porridge on three successive mornings. I made a velvety soup from a pale green pumpkin and cured a fillet of salmon with salt, sugar, dill, and beetroot, giving it a bright red coat. As an afterthought, I pickled some ridge cucumbers to go with it. I had time. It was all possible and worthwhile.
To have time. To see everything as possible and worthwhile. Inhabiting this perspective is a gift, and it’s a gift—I am realizing—that one can only access in moments of deep slowness. After a post-Covid burst of socializing, the pendulum has swung in the other direction. And I feel no compunction about the current position of the pendulum, no self-consciousness about these desires—to stay inside, to let myself be soft and slow, to sleep and dream through these winter months—because the pendulum will, eventually, swing in the other direction. The season will, eventually, change.
How does a person stay fed and warm through the winter? Well, here is your letter of recommendation: soda bread. I have completely fallen off the sourdough bandwagon, it requires a level of forethought and planning that I simply do not possess right now, but lately I have fallen in love with the simple magic of soda bread. This is the recipe I’ve been using. It’s incredibly delicious. The texture reminds me of a gigantic scone, buttery and flavorful and tender. I think the secret is the buttermilk. Lightly toast a slice of soda bread, add more butter and salt for good measure, brew a cup of tea, sit down with a very good novel or TV show: congratulations, you are winning winter!