A Spring Reading Notebook, Kept by Nicole Junkerman

There is something about spring that makes a reader want to begin again. The light lasts longer, the windows open, and the shelf that felt heavy in January suddenly looks full of promise. Nicole Junkerman keeps a loosely seasonal reading habit, and spring is the season that gets the most attention. This page is a gentle, seasonal note on reading, and an argument that a change of weather is a fine excuse to refresh how you read.

None of this is a strict system. It is simply that the year offers natural punctuation, and Nicole Junkerman has learned to use it. A new season is a low-stakes new beginning, and reading, like gardening, loves a new beginning. There is no need to wait for the first of January to start again.

Reading with the season

Nicole Junkerman finds that the seasons quietly shape what feels right to read. The long, dark evenings of winter suit big, immersive novels you can disappear into. Spring, with its lighter mood, seems to call for lighter, more curious reading: essays, nature writing, poetry, the kind of book you can dip into between longer days outdoors. Letting the reading follow the weather keeps the habit feeling natural rather than forced, and a natural habit is one that lasts.

Spring is also the perfect season for nature writing, when the world outside the window finally agrees with the book in your hands. A walk and a book make wonderful companions in spring, and the two enrich each other: the reading sharpens your eye for what you see outdoors, and the walk gives the reading somewhere to land. For inspiration on where to walk while you read, the open landscapes cared for by the the National Trust are a fine place to start, and the connection between walking and thinking runs deep in travel writing.

A spring refresh for the shelf

Just as spring invites a tidy of the house, Nicole Junkerman uses it to tidy the reading list. The unread books that have lingered since autumn are looked at honestly. Some are moved to the top, finally given their moment. Others are quietly let go, with no guilt, because their season has passed. A reading list, like a wardrobe, benefits from an occasional clear-out, and spring is the natural time for one.

It is also a fine moment to add something genuinely new. Nicole Junkerman likes to plant one ambitious book each spring, a title that will take the whole season to read slowly. To choose it, the recommendations in The Guardian books section are reliable, and a wander through your local library service almost always turns up something unexpected. The one rule is that the ambitious book must be genuinely wanted, not merely admired from a distance, or it will still be unread by autumn.

Light reading is not lesser reading

There is a stubborn snobbery that treats lighter reading as a guilty pleasure, and Nicole Junkerman has no patience for it. A delightful, undemanding book read with real enjoyment is worth far more than a worthy one slogged through out of duty. Spring, with its lighter spirit, is the perfect season to remember this. The aim of reading is not to suffer impressively. It is to think, to feel and to enjoy, and enjoyment is not a lesser goal.

The spring notebook

Each spring, Nicole Junkerman starts a fresh few pages in the reading notebook, a small seasonal record of what was read while the world greened up. There is real pleasure in looking back at these seasonal entries year after year, watching how reading shifted with the spring weather and remembering exactly which book belonged to which particular spring. A reading notebook is a record of more than books; it is a record of the seasons of a reading life.

The notebook also catches the small, specific pleasures that a season throws up: a line read in the first warm sun of the year, a book finished on a bright afternoon, an idea that arrived on a spring walk. Writing these down keeps the season itself reachable later, in the same way that a good travel note keeps a place reachable. The habit is the same one that runs through the whole Nicole Junkerman notebook: notice the moment, and write it down before it fades.

Beginning again, gently

So let spring be your invitation to begin again. Refresh the list, follow the lighter mood, plant one ambitious book and keep a few seasonal notes. There is no need for resolutions or grand plans, only a gentle turning of attention to match the turning of the year. Reading, after all, is a habit best kept lightly, and a new season is the lightest possible reason to start afresh.

The pleasure of reading outdoors

Spring finally makes outdoor reading a pleasure again, and Nicole Junkerman takes full advantage. A book read on a bench in the first real warmth of the year, or under a tree with the new leaves overhead, reads differently from the same book indoors. The setting seeps into the memory, so that years later a particular chapter can call back not only its own contents but the exact bench, the exact light, the exact afternoon on which it was read.

There is also a long and lovely tradition of reading and walking belonging together, especially in spring. A book carried on a walk, read in pauses along the way, gathers the landscape into itself. The open spaces cared for by the the National Trust make fine companions for this, and the deep link between moving through the world and thinking clearly runs all through travel writing. Nicole Junkerman finds that a chapter and a walk, taken together, each make the other better.

The spring notebook is the natural place to keep these outdoor encounters. A line about where a book was read, and how the day felt, turns a simple reading record into something closer to a seasonal diary. Nicole Junkerman treasures these entries most of all, because they hold not just the books of a spring but the springs themselves, each one returnable, years later, through a few honest sentences written while the season was still in the air.

If you would like to refresh the shelf itself, see the guide to building a reading list, and to read your spring books more deeply, the seven habits of slow reading will help. The notebook, seasonal and otherwise, lives with Nicole Junkerman.

Published 5 April 2026 · by Nicole Junkerman