Seasonal reading, seasonal depression

Part I

Sub-optimal temperatures, looming deadlines and enveloping darkness at 3pm in the afternoon – the woes of first term are inescapable. If one of the viruses perpetually going around doesn’t get to you, the joyless monotony of your daily commute will. Layers of puffers, hats, scarves, and gloves obscure the body and numb the senses (lest the temperature numbs them first). Rushing into university off the damp, leaf-checked pavement, all seems grey, dead, and meaningless.

Adverts and shopfronts take a more positive spin; draping products in tinsel, fake snow, and fairy lights. For bookshops, seasonal selling tactics are a little more diverse, not just pushing books set in or related to Christmas, but displaying stories that capture the feeling of the season.

‘Seasonal reading’ is often used as a marketing tool, but many writers, bloggers, and BookTok users also write about coordinating books they read with the seasons. That’s not to say that word-of-mouth marketing and para-social influences don’t drive how we buy. Two-part article "All the Fictions for a Seasonal Feast" by American writer Doris Grumbach gives her thoughts on various contemporary works – loved, hated, and unread – for Christmas.

Are marketing, the weather, or seasonal affective disorder driving my choices?

The ‘seasonality’ lies not in the subjects of the titles, but in rounding up her reads for the year and offering them up as holiday entertainment. Others have noted seeking ‘comfort’, ‘contemplation’, or ‘melancholy’ in autumn and winter and selecting books to match them. I’ve found myself unconsciously doing the latter and would like to examine why.

Are marketing, the weather, or seasonal affective disorder driving my choices? Or is this the time of year when I feel it’s most socially acceptable to be sad; a time I allow myself sadness?

Winter 2024

In the depths of first term, reading on my commute into university was a small respite. Midway through Normal People I realised that every winter, inadvertently, I’d read something emotionally fraught centred on loss, loneliness and/or the violent inevitability of change.

Normal People is the perfect read for a little escapism.

I started Sally Rooney’s second novel on a whim, perhaps to have something common to bring up whenever next I saw people, and it devastated me. It’s written with a presence of mind that makes time feel flat. Rooney is ever attentive to the minutiae of life: the scrape of a chair; the destination of a popped cork.

The prose is sparse, but it’s impact is undeniable. In a week or so when I had finished Normal People, the novel’s revolving highs and lows had exhausted me. The characterisation felt hollow. Marianne’s suffering was trite and affected. I felt nothing but in the midst of it, the injury of starving for joy and love that remains evasive was very dear to me.

I understand technically what Rooney tries to achieve through juxtaposition, but after Connel and Marianne’s first term at Trinity it became predictable and almost juvenile. Knowing a shift in the mood was coming eroded the impact of when it did. Some of the dualism was more effective, like the wielding of retrospect and nostalgia against Connell.

Post-Leaving Cert, Connell is caught between longing for the careless simplicity of his school life and guilt over his careless cruelty. He wishes to fix the past but wants to nestle into the shards of it, exactly as it was. His moral failings make it a struggle to fully believe in the sensitive, emotionally attuned masculinity he’s positioned to represent, but they make his character multifaceted and realistic. He allows guilt to gnaw at him in a way that’s almost transactional, as if he could understand and apologise to Marianne by also experiencing social isolation.

His love is shown practically. He martyrs himself for her: Marianne both his idol and his damsel. Although the chapters alternate focus between them, Marianne’s characterisation felt restricted to how Connell saw her. Outside of their relationship, she dissolves into vague comments on class, fickle friends, and an unelaborated backstory.

It’s frustrating that her mental health isn’t given the clinical validation that Connell’s is, and that her self-sufficient nature (and stint maladaptively coping via sadomasochism – a little cliché) props up her lack of self-preservation. In the short story "At the Clinic", which the novel is based on, a single allusion to her being abused by her mother’s boyfriend provides a satisfactory explanation. Without this in the novel, the sparse picture of her childhood and family dynamic makes Marianne feel unfinished.

At first, I sided with the common critiques of her character, refusing to belief she wasn’t smart enough to help herself; but I’ve come to think that says more about me than it does about Rooney’s character building. The way Marianne is presented as fragmented, incomplete, and contradictory makes sense when considered through the lens of low self-esteem. Exploring the erosion of her self-image through a series of experiences over a single, casual event avoids melodrama.

The novel’s style is astute and errs on the side of Naturalism. There’s an intentional distance between Marianne and the reader that makes what’s known about her merely suggestive, rather than directly explanatory. We’re given the space to consider how her family, her social ostracization and her partners shape her behaviour. The lack in her character permits that.

Normal People is the perfect read for a little escapism. Rooney is masterful in drawing out tenderness from the mundane. At time it felt too much, and as the novel progressed, predictability muted its impact. Regardless, I’d recommend it as a short, fairly enjoyable read. Although I didn’t love Normal People, I’d like to read it again, being more attentive to how Rooney uses absence.

Part II

The January of my second year I read Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood: one of the stereotypical expansive reads for sad, self-pitying 20 year-olds. I knew the novel as a favourite of a waifish, artistic girl I’d gone to secondary school with. After seeing it candidly pictured in a friend’s Instagram story, I bought it. Having read Desire and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki… I was no stranger to Murakami’s casual yet surreal treatment of reality, and of course the often disappointing one-dimensionality of his female characters.

At times Norwegian Wood felt weighed down in the latter: Naoko’s hypersexuality in and amidst her emotional instability, as well as Toru’s willingness to indulge her – I’d argue use her – despite his hesitance and later guilt, felt inescapably bleak. Despite this, the novel showcases a comforting beauty and humour in the mundane. Toru’s militaristic dorm and his neurotic roommate’s radio exercises spring to mind. His waiting for Midori in a quiet railway café, or them watching a fire engulf her neighbourhood from her balcony.

Norwegian Wood serves not only as a roadmap through the challenges of early adulthood but as a hope

The opening memory of the meadow, edged by mountains and an endless sky, establishes the powers of nature, the idyll and an insatiable craving for normality that the novel returns to again and again. Murakami intersperses these moments in the wider context of grief, creating an atmosphere symbolic of the loss, conflict and strain that comes with entering adulthood.

Death passes from Kizuki – Toru’s best friend – to his girlfriend Naoko, who Toru spends the novel trying to relieve from its burden. Midori’s father and Hatsumi both display the meshing of life and death into one spectral experience. I spent that January in my little room at Parsons House spiralling: plagued by bouts of insomnia and anxiety, desperately trying to convince my Senior Tutor that I wasn’t ill enough to have to take an interruption of studies (I was and later did). The hazy, liminal recollections of someone else’s adolescence were a welcome distraction.

Toru, the protagonist, is an unfailing everyman. Apolitical, detached, and passionless, Murakami uses his banality as a starting point from which to build the characteristics of those around him. His character expands and revises, absorbing or avoiding elements of the people he meets across the novel.

Arguably, these acquisitions are through moments of intimacy. From nursing his sick roommate, he rediscovers his sense of empathy amidst the sterile conservatism of his dorm. Midori coaches him on how to be her boyfriend, providing a more normal relationship than his tumultuous bond with Naoko. He rejects both the student protests and womanising with Nagasawa for their superficiality and lack of commitment.

Naoko has the greatest influence over him as through her death he finally, fully experiences grief - and the destabilisation he’s been avoiding. As Murakami writes, death is “not as the opposite [of] but as a part of life”; therefore inescapable.

Retrospectively I can appreciate the exploration of grief through his character, but I hated Toru while reading the novel. In his emptiness, he is selfish, tactless, and, though modest enough to know his faults, fails to fix them.

I preferred to think of it as Naoko’s story, for which Toru was but a confused interpreter. For her letters, her intermittence, the remote mountaintop sanatoriums where she convalesces, she’s the more romantic of the two. But in their opposite journeys in grief, hers is the ‘failure’ – Toru survives, and she doesn’t.

This is, I think, the core message of the novel. It serves not only as a roadmap through the challenges of early adulthood but as a hope; an assertion that they are survivable. Everything will end. Time will move forwards, taking heartache and frustrations with it, ending habits and relationships in its wake. Each period of life is encased by the next, pasting each experience over another. Eventually what surrounds us now will be nothing but memory, waiting for a familiar song or a certain moment to draw us back into the past.

Part III

Winter 2023

The Winter of first year I read I’m Telling the Truth, but I’m Lying: Essays by Bassey Ikpi. My Goodreads tells me it was late January, but I remember it as December – lying despondent in bed; avoiding flatmates, course mates, coursework; and praying for the end of the year as if that would solve anything.

I’m Telling the Truth, but I’m Lying remains one of my favourite reads

As Ikpi elaborates, memory can be as powerful as it is deceptive. The essays are presented as memoirs centring on her family, migration, relationships, and coming to live with bipolar II disorder.

It was soothing. It was unnerving. The emotional honesty of some of the essays made me nauseous. More than once I wondered if I should l stop reading – pick back up when the subject matter didn’t feel as close – but the collection’s vulnerability demands the same of you.

In part, my reaction stemmed from how much I related to the author: a Nigerian in the West, an older sister, suffocating in the grasp of unchecked depression, convinced she’ll never redirect her life into anything meaningful. Her major challenges – dropping out of college, struggling to live independently or form healthy relationships, becoming too sick to work, attempting suicide, and being sectioned – felt like ominous projections. Like the episode I was a month or so into would stretch on for a lifetime, despite listening to my GP, rounds of counselling, and talking therapy, self help and medication.

Depression, as Ikpi puts it, would “always come looking for me again. It will always return” and find me waiting: to get better, to end, to be normal, to return to a life that no longer exists. I couldn’t bring myself to talk about my feelings with anyone other than medical professionals, and even then, there was a veneer of intellectualising things. To be privy to that kind of conversation, even in print, was overwhelming.

Ikpi crafts a retrospective story of her life through a series of evocative moments. Although you’re aware from the start that the contents are at best subjective, at worst wholly invented, the tone of the essays are earnest, selfconscious, and exacting, giving them the weight of undeniable truths. It doesn’t matter that Ikpi unreliably narrates her life – we all do. In charting the pathology of her illness, exposing her faults and finding meaning in them, she is unwaveringly honest.

The recollections of her childhood in Ugep establish the influence of generational trauma and familial conditioning in later life. More intimate details – the grief of being named in memory of someone, questioning a non-nuclear family upbringing – flesh out otherwise sparse early memories. Believing that her parents’ – especially her mother’s love – is conditional fuels lasting anxiety, perfectionism, and selfpunitive behaviour. The fear of falling short of her family’s expectations follows her like a shroud into adulthood. Patterns from this dynamic arise in her romantic relationships in adulthood: seeking affection where it is withheld and enduring selfishness, neglect and manipulation in hopes of love. Ikpi explores how memory is often undermined and warped by mental illness, erasing lengths of time at will or turning the everyday into a cache of shame.

I’m Telling the Truth, but I’m Lying remains one of my favourite reads, despite how painful it was to get through. Ikpi lays bare the experience of her illness in a way that transcends the written text: it becomes a conversation, a living testimony. Hints of her career as a spoken word artist come through in the lyricism of the writing. Elsewhere, that rhythm and the “diaspora poet” vibe in some of her phrasing would have put me off, but her sincerity more than makes up for it. The collection speaks to what it means to go into the world as your parents’ child, and the details of mental illness and recovery in a way that is both deeply personal yet universal.

Winter 2025: Present Day

It’s still painfully cold and academically just as harsh, but February feels lighter than December. Spring bulbs are pushing up, the equinox is closer, and the Sun has returned to daytime. I went into this piece wondering if there was a tenable link between this time of year (poor winter weather, university pressure, etc.) and my reading choices but honestly, I have no answer.

Whether I was unknowingly reading stories that I could relate to or taking advantage of my low mood to tackle difficult, emotionally wounding books I can’t say. I think it was both: seeking ‘empathy’ through something in which I saw myself, and reasoning that I’d have less to lose by reading sad things when I was already depressed. I wanted to feel something, to escape feeling nothing.

Out of curiosity, I asked some friends if they too shifted into a seasonal reading pattern. Some agreed, suggesting Poppy War (R.F. Kuang) and The Silent Patient (Alex Michaelides) as other apt novels, or delving into philosophy or Gabor Maté’s work on psychological trauma and addiction. Interestingly, one messaged me to say they read more pornographic literature in winter.

Obviously reading preference is highly individual, as are the confounding variables of mental health and academic performance. The influence of nature and the seasons, however, is broadly similar, whether you notice and submit to it or not. So, before winter is over, if you can, use your commutes and free time to read something moving; something you can introspect over or project onto.

Let yourself be thawed out of coldness and into thought.