PotsandPlots

This post is probably a bit pointless, but hey, this is the internet.

A few weeks ago, I went to a book event, where I was definitely a fish out of water. It was hot, loud and I didn’t know anybody there. Well, I knew one other person (@thebookweb on Instagram), and they knew me, and that was it.

Sarah suggested that instead of yelling at each other over the noise, we head to the nearby flagship Waterstones on Picadilly. A visit to this bookshop is always inspirational, and it wasn’t long before we were both juggling books, trying to decide how many we could reasonably take home.

I picked up Ali Smith’s Spring – part of her Seasonal Quartet. Spring was on its way, and I thought it would be a thematic addition to the blog, reading one book each season for a year.

Last week, I read Gliff (yet to be reviewed) and very much enjoyed it. With April having arrived, I figured I’d better start Spring.

Amazingly, I remembered to go to my Storygraph page before starting Spring to update my Currently Reading tab, when I noticed that Spring was book 3 in the Seasonal Quartet.

A bit of digging told me that I really needed to start with book 1, Autumn, as they have common themes and characters that build as you read them.

I must confess, I had thought the books were more of cycle, i.e., they followed round in a loop, and it didn’t matter what order you read them.

Why did I think this? I’m not sure. If you stop and think about it, that would be a very difficult thing for a series of novels to do – though I think it would be a cool literary device.

I think that perhaps because I garden, I tend to think of the seasons as an endless cycle, each blending into the other with jobs to be done, and continuous birth, death and rebirth. The story of a garden, and its seasons, never ends.

But apparently, this is not the case for Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet. This left me feeling somewhat discombobulated. I wanted to read Spring, but it would be weird to start in the middle of the series and even weirder to read a book called Autumn in April, especially considering I’d be pairing my images with spring thumbnails.

I guess I will start Autumn in about 6 months and will be back to write about Spring this time next year.