This month, we’re drawn to books that ask plain, difficult things: what makes a life feel real, what we owe each other, where meaning comes from—if it comes at all. While we sift through these ideas, we'll be lounging under duvets.
We begin with Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time, which moves through the garden as idea and refuge, tracing how visions of paradise are built, defended, and lost. Equally poignant, in The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson writes love and identity as something lived in motion—tender, rigorous, unsentimental. Sophie Calle’s Suite Vénitienne follows desire into the streets, turning pursuit into method and observation into art. Each title, these and the ones below, are for reading slowly, not because they’re delicate, but because they’re exact.
The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson
Suite Vénitienne, Sophie Calle
The Garden Against Time, Olivia Laing
A favorite deep cut of the Cadel Slip from Lingerie on Film, photographed by Bilal Taright.
The Empathy Exams, Leslie Jamison
The Rings of Saturn, W. G. Sebald
The Second Sex, Simone De Beauvoir
On Beauty, Zadie Smith
At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, Sarah Bakewell
An icon of twentieth-century left-wing intellectualism and European feminist thought, Simone de Beauvoir appears throughout Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café as a thinker who keeps existentialism tethered to lived reality. Bakewell often returns to Beauvoir’s insistence that a life isn’t something you uncover like a hidden truth, but something you actively make—through choices, commitments, and the conditions you’re forced to navigate.
Famously, Beauvoir framed life as a project: unfinished, contingent, and continually revised. Throwing out resolutions, this way of seeing is a stellar way to move through the new year.
“Stop worrying about your identity and concern yourself with the people you care about, ideas that matter to you, beliefs you can stand by, tickets you can run on."
This idea from Zadie Smith's On Beauty feels especially bracing now. In a culture that urges constant self-definition, she shifts the focus outward: away from identity as a performance, toward commitment as a practice. Who you care for. What you believe in. The ideas you’re willing to show up for again and again.
The White Album, Joan Didion
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman
Weather, Jenny Offill
Something from Nothing: A Cookbook, Alison Roman
A Thousand Feasts, Nigel Slater
Like the books that ask what makes a life feel real, cookbooks remind us how to take days as they come, and as they are.
On the surface, Something from Nothing by Alison Roman is about making dinner with what you already have. But beneath the recipe list is a comforting philosophy: a way of living that takes limits seriously and still finds abundance.
Following a similar train of thought, Nigel Slater's A Thousand Feasts shares his memories of meals from all over the world from miso soup for breakfast to a ripe mango devoured during a monsoon. This might be our favorite selection this month for its armchair travel effect.
Our uniform for these leisurely pursuits:
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