Book recommendation to finish out a small pile with seasonal titles

December 5, 2022 8:19 AM

I have three books with seasonal titles sitting in a pile: Autumn Light by Pico Iyer, Wintering by Katherine May, and Summer on the Lakes by Margaret Fuller. I'm looking for a non-fiction book with the word "Spring" in the title that is similarly slow and contemplative.

I'm not totally sure Summer... fits that theme since I haven't read it yet, but it was a Maria Popova recommendation, so I suspect it does.

Two books that keep coming up in searches for me are Rachel Carson's classic Silent Spring and The Hidden Spring by Mark Solms (a new book on neuroscience), but I feel like that there may be something else out there that might fit in better thematically with the ones above.

posted by laze to Media & Arts (7 answers total)

Best answer: Try "Spring Cannot Be Cancelled: David Hockney in Normandy" by Martin Gayford and David Hockney.
posted by oddovid at 9:40 AM on December 5, 2022

North With the Spring, by Edwin Way Teale is a nice non-fiction book.
posted by RedEmma at 10:58 AM on December 5, 2022

Best answer: Edward Thomas, In Pursuit of Spring. It's on Gutenberg, but there is what looks like a lovely edition with photographs.

You may or may not think of poetry as non-fiction, but the "ten poems about" series has a Spring book - these have really good juxtapositions and are always worth a read.
posted by paduasoy at 11:34 AM on December 5, 2022

The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald is a fantastic book, languid enough in places that it might fit your theme in spite of being short, though pacier near the end.
posted by terretu at 11:44 AM on December 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

If your summer doesn't play out right, I suggest reading Tove Jansson's The Summer Book to see if that works instead.
posted by carrioncomfort at 3:31 PM on December 5, 2022

Response by poster: Wow. These are all really good. This is going to be a hard choice! (And multiple new books are now on my to-read list.) Thank you.
posted by laze at 10:44 AM on December 6, 2022

I completely missed that you were looking for non-fiction, so I'll have to retract the comment I originally wrote, which was:

Spring, by Ali Smith

I haven't read this one yet, but I love Smith's books, and I've read Autumn and Winter, which were both excellent.

However, if you'd like to follow up your non-fiction series of seasons with some fiction, Smith's whole seasonal quartet has gotten fantastic reviews.
posted by kristi at 12:03 PM on December 9, 2022