Last Travel Library of Blogmas (I think)! Today I have Wintering, by Katherine May (*affiliate link to bookshop.org). It’s the December book club book in the Adventure Queens Facebook group. I’d not heard of it but “Adventure Queens” + “wild swimming” + “trip to Scandinavia” + the winter theme convinced me that this was the kind of thing I’d enjoy and was also the kind of thing that would go nicely in Blogmas. And it has a beautiful cover.
Readers, it is not my thing at all.
It’s not about adventures at all. It’s one of these mindfulness/philosophy/nature things that are popular at the moment. It’s not so much “about” anything as it’s a meander through the thoughts and feelings of an author who’s using the metaphor of “winter” as “hard times in my life”. Those hard times are mostly “my husband had appendicitis on my birthday”, “needing to try a low-fibre diet for two weeks” and “being pregnant with the baby I thought I could never (well, for four months) have”. They’re pretty small problems in the grand scheme of things. I’m not the kind of person who’s overwhelmingly gushingly sympathetic over the tiniest things and I’m not inclined to be sympathetic at “my life is so hard that I had to retreat from everything and write a book about self-care over it all!”. Take that as a warning – I’m not going to get any more sympathetic as the review goes on, although I’m going to try not to be entirely negative!
The winter theme is a metaphor. Various hardships are sorted into months from October to March, occasionally at random. They’re rarely really tightly related to the month they’re filed under. They’re certainly not happening in that month, in that order. That might have been quite interesting, to follow someone’s life through a difficult winter, seeing their struggles and solutions as the days get shorter and colder and darker and then as they get longer and lighter and warmer again. But this is not that book. This is not a linear story of how May got past the metaphorical winters during an actual winter.
I’m fine with it not being linear – I’ve written two books allegedly following a straight timeline which actually jump all over the place but at least I’m pretending it’s a cohesive chronological narrative. If each chapter had just had a title and been episodes from various metaphorical winters in her life, it would have worked fine. I had the same problem with The Year of Living Danishly – I didn’t like that it tried to follow a chronological story while also filling it full of things that had no relation whatsoever to the chronology. This structure works or that structure works but you can’t use them both together. So what I don’t like is that the book tries to tell you this is one woman’s journey and then doesn’t even try to disguise that it’s actually not and that’s what I don’t like.
But that’s a very petty literal-minded thing to criticise in a book that’s kind of about being the opposite of literal and linear.
Yes, the “wintering” of the title refers to the dark times in your life. It’s really about recognising that life comes in phases and cycles rather than being a straight line from birth to death. Like the seasons will come round again, the dark times will come again and like spring follows winter, the better times will eventually follow the dark times. That sometimes you need to stop trying to be productive, stop trying to push your way through the dark times and do what your body or mind needs until your winter is over.
I don’t entirely disagree. There’s plenty I don’t disagree with, in fact. The chapter about celebrating solstice at Stonehenge made a good point – I would like to at least acknowledge the eight-fold Wheel of the Year in 2023. It means noticing and celebrating various things about every six weeks and really properly feeling time moving on. That’s in a good way – here is spring and I’m celebrating it, rather than half-noticing it as I go about my life, here comes summer, here are the changes in the year. I like that. I’ve added those eight occasions to my nature calendar and I’m going to attempt to at least notice them in the next year.
I also like the idea of not being constantly productive and feeling like you have to do something to deserve your existence – as I frantically try to get 24 Blogmas posts ready before going on holiday and do all the Guide and Brownie events and fill up all the weekends. I will definitely be taking more time to relax in 2023. More time just doing nothing. Self-care is important and sometimes that means putting a bomb in the bath, sometimes it means leaving a job that’s killing you inside and sometimes it means not packing two Girlguiding weekends away, a spa evening, a skating trip, a planning meeting, a theatre trip and Remembrance parade into the same month, giving you approximately three free evenings in thirty days.
There’s a lot of good stuff in here, a lot of stuff I like, a lot of practical stuff, it’s just hidden under a tale of not-that-hard hardships. I’ll definitely be adopting some of the practices and thoughts in this book. It’s not the concept behind this book I dislike, it’s the execution. If someone else took the idea – if I took the idea – it would be a completely different book and there’s a chance I might like it. Equally, to be fair, there’s a chance I might absolutely hate it and find it irredeemable. Wintering isn’t irredeemable.
But… I don’t like Wintering overall. The main issue is that it’s simply not the kind of book I’m into. That’s not its fault and it’s not my fault. I’m not into introspection and philosophy. I’m the hard-headed practical type who’d rather tackle a problem with an axe in one hand and a roll of heavy-duty tape in the other. Katherine May feels like the kind of person who fills her days with worrying and overthinking pointless meaningless things because she’s bored or she doesn’t have anything more urgent to do. She feels like the sort of person I’d be polite to around the office and then internally groan when she comes in every Monday and repeats the same spiel: “I’ve had a terrible weekend. I’ve been so ill and my husband is wonderful but I just felt so awful!”. That’s fair enough. We all have bad times and we all feel ill. But when you get it every. single. week. you start to find you’re going to lunch at a different time and you’re going down to the kitchen to grab a drink while she’s in the meeting. This is not fair on Katherine May. I am entirely projecting here. She’s reminding me of someone I used to work with who was fun at first and then became an utter energy vampire. That’s not May’s fault. But I do think she’s a similar kind of person, someone I’d struggle to feel fond of.
When I’d finished Wintering, I looked up some reviews. There are plenty that throw around words like “beautiful”, “lovely”, “lyrical”, “inspiring” and so on. But there are a few that mention things like “self-indulgent” and “privilege” and “don’t know what the point of this is”. I fall into the second category. I’m always glad when I find other people don’t love a book I didn’t love but I also remind myself of a couple of things. Other people not liking it doesn’t mean it’s a bad book. It doesn’t mean we’re bad people. It just means we’re a bad match with this particular book.
So, to summarise and end on a positive note: this is not a bad book, it’s just not the book for me. I will observe the solstices and take time to rest sometimes