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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
As a book lover, I steer well clear of over-prescriptive guides to my reading or my library. I have been known to cancel people who offer to reorganise my bookshelves by colour (the original sin) or suggest overambitious plans (I once lost a whole year struggling to read classics end to end, like trying to survive on a diet of solely 12th- or 18th-century recipes).
But when friends in an international online book group told me they planned their reading by the seasons, I was intrigued. We spend much of our lives online or shuttling between multiple geographies. Returning to the steady beat and rhythm of the seasons — an old, natural time, rather than airport time — is seductive.
The publishing industry already welcomes the enthusiasm around summer paperbacks/bestsellers and beach reads — pushing up sales in the traditionally slow months between June and August — and does brisk business around Christmas. “Books have their seasons as well defined as those of nature,” wrote AH Leypoldt, a cheerleader for summer reading, in The Literary News back in 1892. He goes on: “No summer scene is complete without the novel. Whether the hero lounges on the piazza, or swings in his hammock, or drifts idly in his boat . . . romance has always pictured him with a novel close at hand.”
What might reading by the seasons actually mean? Perhaps the closest equivalent I have comes from visual arts. The ragamala (“garland of ragas”) series is an achingly beautiful cycle of paintings from around the 16th and 17th centuries in India, depicting various ragas, or musical compositions. The ragas most frequently pictured were Deepak, Megha, Sri, Bhairava, Malkauns and Hindola, sung at different times of the day, and matched to the six seasons of the medieval Indian calendar: summer, monsoon, autumn, light winter, deep winter and spring.
With apologies to classical music purists for oversimplifying, essentially each raga brings sound to life through colour, and catches the mood of the season. Raga Deepak, sung perfectly, is said to spark summer blazes, and is painted in flaming oranges and scorching reds; Raga Megha whispers monsoon seductions in thunderstorm blacks, restful blues and greens.
My summer and winter reading lists are often easily sorted. The ragamala albums I loved in my youth subconsciously taught me to listen by season, and my reading also began to keep pace with time. Summer fare is light, as a season for racy fiction and short stories but alongside, I love the sensory escape of travel and food writing; in winter, I turn to fat biographies, multi-volume histories, and welcome bloody and cosy mysteries and spy thrillers for razai (quilt-and-chai) reading.
The neglected seasons, for me and many readers, are spring and the monsoon (early fall, autumn or hurricane) season, depending on where you live. I turn to Ali Smith, author of a quartet of novels that cycles through the four seasons. “Winter has Epiphany. Spring’s gifts are different,” she writes in Spring. “In the French revolutionary calendar, along with the last days of March, it becomes Germinal, the month of return to the source, to the seed, to the germ of things . . . April the anarchic, the final month, of spring the great connective.” Return, revolution, restlessness: my book list builds itself.
Readers might want simply to pause every three months, to reflect on what they want or need from the coming season. Are you in a busy, scurrying cycle? Perhaps poetry — Simon Armitage’s Dwell, set in Cornwall, a plea to slow down, or Haiku: Japanese Poems for the Four Seasons, compiled by Ornella Civardi and illustrated by Kaori Yamaguchi, for instance — might provide a brief break from interruptions. In the depths of winter blues, we might find solace in the unexpected — Chloe Dalton’s Raising Hare, about a workaholic political adviser who adopts a baby leveret, or James Rebanks’s mesmerising 2024 travelogue Place of Tides, where he meets a “duck woman” on a tiny Norwegian island.
Summer reading can go beyond lazy beach reads — and these lines in Tana French’s In the Woods give me fresh inspiration: “this is summer full-throated and extravagant in a hot pure silkscreen blue . . . It tingles on your skin with BMX wind in your face, ladybug feet up your arm; it packs every breath full of mown grass and billowing wash lines; it chimes and fountains with birdcalls, bees, leaves and football-bounces and skipping-chants.” “Novels!”, I scribble to myself, listing André Aciman’s 2007 Call Me By Your Name, of Italy and the summer storms of first love, and perhaps Deborah Levy’s surreal 2016 Hot Milk, featuring mothers and daughters in a Spanish village.
I wouldn’t want to get too mannered about reading in season — reading lists should be a joy to compile, not a mechanical trundle around the calendar. But I believe these rhythms are innate to us, even if they lie dormant under the surface of our crowded lives. Perhaps we should allow the seasons to seep into our reading, changing pace according to the glide of time — the slow slant of early spring light falling across a page, another pile waiting to be read under winter blankets, by firelight.
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