Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Time

Reading 80% of this book was an exercise in torture. I'm always a little wary of personal memoirs cum self-help books but a few have been transformative for me (ie. Pamela Druckerman's Bringing Up Bébé). Katherine May hooked me early with this book, the prose was sharp and the anecdotes interesting however it very quickly devolved into anecdote after anecdote from a brief period in her life where, I guess, she was forced to work less?

This book is rife with privilege, which doesn't always bother me but in this particular case it seems to hallow where half of of the book is dedicated to the message of "slow down, take it easy" and the other half is, "go to Iceland, trek the northern tundras of Sweden".

Ultimately this book fell into the same trap as Gretchen Rubin's Happier At Home (a did not finish from last year); an extremely self absorbed upper-middle class person thinking that their experience = wisdom and is therefore worth writing an entire book.

Zero stars. Did not finish.