A Time to Read?

I was talking to a library staff member yesterday about books we are reading. I just finished reading Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, while a friend of mine just finished Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop. The woman I was talking to said she always feels like Dickens is to be read in winter. I get it, many of us feel that certain categories of reading are reserved for certain months or seasons.

The year begins with more reading of self-help books than ever. This is because we’re determined to make good on New Year’s resolutions–books on dieting, exercise, smoking cessation, and improving personal relationships get checked out from libraries. Whether they lead to the results promised in their optimistic titles is another question.

In summer we segue to lighter reading matter. They’re called summer reads, or beach reads–often paperbacks that fit comfortably in the hand, or can be easily packed into a beach bag. Many of these have now made the transition to eBook format. When you’re out sunning or watching the waves gently lap the shore, you don’t want to be reading anything that requires a lot of attention–especially not something with a tragic ending.

By September, major publishers are introducing their fall lists of new, major titles. Everybody wants to get copies of the hottest bestsellers, and this is the season when people are asking each other, ‘Have you read (fill in the blank) yet?’ ‘No,’ we answer, ‘I’ve been meaning to get to it. Have you read (fill in another blank)?’

But there has long been this mystique about winter reading. Things are slower, particularly after the holidays, and we have time to pick up longer novels, those heady classics we’ve wanted to read for years, Jane Austen novels we want to re-read, or books they ‘made us’ read in high school that we want to try again. I used to reserve December for reading exclusively long works, Don Quixote, or Moby Dick, or Les Miserables.

But of course none of these are rules, only tendencies of people. And not everyone is subject to them. Plenty of people read cozy mysteries and romance novels–the stuff of beach reads–all year long, while some people are reading classics of 19th century literature in the heat of summer.

What about you? Do you find yourself reading a certain type of book at a given time of year? Or does the season matter at all?