Summer Reading List: Six Books for Slowing Down

Summer can sometimes feel like such a whirlwind. The days are longer, and you feel like you have to make the most of them - which usually involves cramming beach trips, park picnics, bar crawls, and friends’ destination weddings into your schedule like a hectic game of Tetris. I can’t help with that, but what I can do is recommend some fantastic books to keep you company in the quiet moments you save for yourself. In keeping with MIRROR WATER’s mission, these books act as reminders to slow down. Don’t doom scroll; read these books instead.

Slowing by Rachel Schwartzmann

It’s in the name! Written by Slow Stories podcast host Rachel Schwartzmann, Slowing is a much-needed invitation to consider how slowing down might benefit your life, your relationships, and your creativity. If you’ve ever found yourself wanting to be more present but unsure of where to start, Rachel Schwartzmann’s essays and prompts act as a guiding light, cutting through the fog of modern life to reveal sparkling moments of awe and intention.

Saving Time by Jenny Odell

Author of How To Do Nothing Jenny Odell is back with an interrogation of “productivity.” What does it mean to live a productive life? How can we redefine our relationship to time? What is leisure, really, and how can we enjoy it? This book encourages us to think of leisure for leisure’s sake—not just as a way to recharge for more work. Admittedly, this book might be a little denser than your typical summer reading fare—she references sociological studies, labor history, and the evolution of the buckeye—but it’s a rewarding read, and beautifully written: “What songs are audible when the wind stops? What has been kept alive in the time snatched from work and sheltered from ongoing destruction—what moments of recognition, what ways of relating, what other imagined worlds, what other selves? What other kinds of time?” Jenny Odell has this magical ability to take something as niche as bird-watching live-cams and to turn them into expansive symbols of the way we live, and how we can be better to ourselves and to the earth. 

Wintering by Katherine May

When you think of winter, what comes to mind? A fresh blanket of snow? Quiet streets? Days spent under a cozy blanket, holed up in your apartment? There is a general sense of retreating from the world—whatever version of hibernation humans do. In Wintering, Katherine May shares with us her personal winter: her husband got sick, her own health issues caused her to leave her job, and her son stopped going to school. When it rains, it pours. Perhaps you, too, have had periods of your life like this: when the rug is pulled out from under you, and you need to pull back. In this braided narrative—moving through mythology and calling on the wisdom of the natural world—Katherine May writes with honesty and vulnerability. This book is like an encouraging hand on the shoulder, giving you the permission you didn’t know you needed to rest during painful times: “Doing those deeply unfashionable things—slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting—is a radical act now, but it is essential. This is a crossroads we all know, a moment when you need to shed a skin.” If you’ve gone through anything like this, you know how lonely it can be. What’s so revelatory about this book is its inherent understanding that these times, these feelings, are not a linear progression of your life. They are cyclical like the seasons.

Temporary by Hilary Leichter

The heroine of Temporary works at a temp agency, taking on all manner of strange and surreal gig work. We begin: “There was the assassin. There was the child. There was the marketing and the fundraising and also the development. There was the keeper of the donor list. There was the shredder of the master list.” Temporary is a wonderfully absurd satire about trying to find happiness and fulfilment under capitalism. The gorgeous melody of Hilary Leichter’s prose will make you slow down, just so you can sit in her sentences a little longer. This absolute gem of a novel will make you laugh, make you cry, and make you want to hold fast to what’s most important.

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

This novel begins when a burnt-out woman leaves the city and returns to her secluded hometown in rural Australia. She stays in a cabin in a small religious community, finding sanctuary amongst nuns. Charlotte Wood’s prose has a meditative quality; so much care is giving to noticing the sounds of chickens or the way the light at dusk comes into the cabin. But even in the calm, the chaos of life comes in: there’s a mouse infestation, the return of the skeletal remains of a nun who was thought to be murdered, and an unexpected guest that leads the narrator to confront her own grief. Ultimately, this is a beautiful novel about reckoning with the past and what one finds when they retreat from the world. 

On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle, tr. Barbara Haveland

Rare book dealer Tara Selter is stuck in the 18th of November. She’s not sure how it happened, but every morning, she wakes up and it’s the same day. She knows what time it’s going to start raining. She can tell where in the house her beloved, Thomas, is just by tracing the sound of his steps and the way he moves through the kitchen. Why did this happen to her, and how is she going to get out? It’s a Groundhog Day-like mystery, but the attention that’s paid to every single detail of this day is hypnotic. The pattern of such a normal day reads like poetry. There are going to be seven books in total, but only four have been translated into English so far. Even the experience of reading Solvej Balle’s series requires slowing down, a devoted patience.

Katie Yee is a writer based in Brooklyn. Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar is her first novel. You can find her on Instagram at @emergencychampagne or subscribe to her Substack, Dear Void, for more book recommendations.

Written by
Katie Yee

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