Happy Tuesday everyone! I hope your week is going great. Otherwise, I hope that it will start looking up in the coming days. It is my fervent hope that it will usher in positive energy, blessings, healing, and forgiveness for everyone. I hope and pray that 2022 will not only be a good year but a great one. As it is Tuesday, it is also time for a Top 5 Tuesday update. Top 5 Tuesday was originally created by Shanah @ the Bionic Bookworm but is now currently being hosted by Meeghan @ Meeghan Reads.

his week’s topic: Books That Remind You of a Season

Winter, spring, summer, or falls, as the song goes. Here are books that remind me of the different seasons. The Philippines, being a tropical country has only two seasons: summer and rainy season. But for discourse, I will be using the four seasons. Here goes!

Spring

I have never experienced spring although I have long wanted to experience it. Witnessing Japan’s cherry blossoms is on top of my traveling priorities should they start accepting tourists. Personally, the image of spring is of flowers, blossoming into beauty. It reminds me of rising up after a long and cold winter.

Two books that remind me of spring are Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The former is the coming age story of a girl born into poverty but not letting it dampen her spirit. The latter is about a young woman’s rite of passage into womanhood. Both are the coming-of-age stories of two young women who flourished despite the odds and took control of their own destinies.

Summer

Ah. Summer. My favorite season. That was until I got to witness the beauty of autumn back in 2017. When I was younger, I loved summer because it meant school break. As I grow older, I started to realize that it was more than that. It was a season about learning one’s self and the world as a whole. It is for this reason that, despite the book’s dark subjects, Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece To Kill a Mockingbird reminds me of summer.

This is the same case for Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe. More importantly, it was about exploring one’s identity and finding love during the summer. It also fits this month’s celebration of LGBTQ+ heritage. Summer is also synonymous with the sun, the beach, the sea, and the sand. Charmaine Wilkerson’s debut novel, Black Cake, has them in spades. The smell of food also permeated the book’s atmosphere.

Autumn/Fall

Autumn is my new favorite season after I got to experience and witness it during my 2017 adventures in South Korea. I was in awe of the visual feast. My friends and I were lucky enough to witness its peak; a week earlier the trees would still be green and a week later the leaves would have already fallen from the trees.

Two books that remind me of autumn are Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. It was the atmosphere of both books that reminded me of autumn. There is a coldness that pervaded the air. At times, it was ominous and yet it was not as threatening as the winter breeze. Both are essentially Gothic books which, I guess, added to the evocation of the autumn breeze.

Winter

And the last season of the year! Like spring, I am yet to personally experience winter. Maybe Sapporo, Japan one day? One day. Some day. In the meantime, I will save money to allow me to visit as many countries and earn as many experiences as I can.

Anyway, the first image that comes to mind when winter is mentioned is snow and the white landscape. It was this landscape that was captured by Norwegian literary titan Tarjei Vesaas in his novel The Ice Palace. Although it grappled with a dark subject, the book’s lyrical prose made the Norwegian winter landscape come alive. Beyond the pictures of winter wonderland, winter also reminds me of hopelessness and prolonged periods of darkness. These images were captured in the works of two Nobel Laureates in Literature: Herta Müller’s The Hunger Angel and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Interestingly, charted the story of their main characters in Russian concentration camps, or gulags.

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