Book Review: Wintering by Katherine May

I read Wintering in November 2021, at the end of the year a rheumatoid arthritis diagnosis turned rest from a nice idea into a prescription. My Goodreads review from that season is a single line (“a good book about what it means to take time to reset”), and I stand by it. I just have more to say now.

Katherine May’s memoir-in-essays is about wintering: the seasons when life forces you to withdraw (illness, loss, burnout, plain bad luck) and what it looks like to move through them well instead of pretending they aren’t happening. She goes looking for teachers — hibernating dormice, Finnish winter swimmers, Stonehenge at the solstice, her own stretches of being unwell.

What I Loved About Wintering by Katherine May

The reframe. Hustle culture treats a fallow season like a system failure: something to apologize for, fix, or hide. May treats it like winter — a season, with its own work and its own end. Rest is a season, not a reward. I run my business in growth weeks and maintenance weeks these days, so I appreciated a book making the long-form case for the maintenance season at the scale of a whole life.

The timing, for me, was surgical. I read it while my body was enforcing exactly this lesson, which means the book got a fair hearing that pre-diagnosis me might not have given it.

What I Didn’t Love About Wintering

The missing star is honest math. This is a good book that stayed a good book: warm, wise, glad I read it. My five-star shelf rearranges how I live, and Wintering kept me company instead — beautifully, but company all the same.

Final Thoughts on Wintering

If you’re in a season that demands more rest than you planned for (or you can feel one coming), this is a generous companion for doing it on purpose. Pair it with Burnout for the physiology of actually recovering, and How to Do Nothing for the philosophy of refusing the grind altogether.

My final score: 4 out of 5 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Do I recommend this book? 👍 Yes — especially if you’re heading into a hard season.

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