Your Year in Novels

Or: how I finally read Middlemarch

There are certain seasons for certain books. Sometimes, there is even a specific book that must be read on a specific day of the year. I believe strongly in seasonal reading, and am going to share my chaotic yearly literary calendar with you below.

A disclaimer: to solely read according to some seasonal cycle would be silly, and would turn your literary life into a domesticated checkbox experience, bleeding it dry. But, if used as a guideline, the literary calendar has many virtues. Matching your books to the seasons, to the rhythms of the weather and temperature and body and the food you eat, can bring something new out in a book, unveiling a part of it that would otherwise remain obscure. It also lends a certain anchoring to your reading, freeing you from a trap I often fall into—that of not quite knowing what you want to read, and therefore dipping halfheartedly into a few different books while enjoying none of them.

The literary calendar is mostly novels, simply because I tend to think of novels as the anchors of my reading life. Some of what I have to say here is just suggestions, things that I personally find myself drawn to in a given season. Some of it, however, is imperative.