Reading: Wintering

I liked Katherine May's The Electricity of Every Living Thing a great deal, and as someone who generally finds winter very difficult I was keen enough to read her new book, Wintering: How I learned to flourish when life became frozen that I bought a copy a couple of days after it was published last year. (It's the kind of book that I would normally put on my wish list, but my birthday is in May, and I thought it would make more sense to read a book about surviving winter while it actually is winter.)

Although it's structured chronologically, with a section for each month of the winter half of the year, and begins with May and her family experiencing not one but two of the kind of major life events which can spart a personal 'wintering' of depression, Wintering is less a narrative and more of a collection of short essays looking at different aspects of winter, both literally and spiritually, and the ways both humans and animals prepare for and endure the cold and darkness. May's descriptive prose is lovely, and I enjoyed the way she mixes nature and human society, throwing in some mythology, some self-deprecating anecdotes, some current scientific research and a few favourite winter books (many of which are also favourites of mine) to create something that isn't quite a nature book, or a memoir, or a mindfulness book, but combines elements of all three. As with The Electricity of Every Living Thing, I found a lot of Wintering very relatable, and while it didn't suggest any new ways to try to deal with winter, it did make me feel less alone, and reminded me that one day, winter too will pass. 'We take the next necessary action, and the next. At some point along the line, that next action will feel joyful again.'

Reading: Nimona

alithea recommended Nimona to me a few weeks ago, and seeing that it was by Noelle Stevenson, who is the showrunner for the delightful She-Ra and the Princessses of Power, I ordered a copy straight away.

Nimona began life as a webcomic before being published as a graphic novel. Set in a fantasy world which combines dragons, jousts and sword fights with TV news, video calls and takeaway pizza, its central character, Nimona, is a shapeshifter who becomes sidekick to supervillian Ballister Blackheart. It's snarky, funny and surprisingly touching in places, with a background m/m romance, and I thought it was great fun. My only issue is that the text is very small and I could only read it by taking my glasses off and holding the book closer to my face than I normally would.