Your Literary Prescription for 2025

Notes On: Slowmaxxing, Hopecore, and lots of literary reccs <3

“Sometimes taking time is actually a shortcut” — Haruki Murakami

“Hope and fear cannot occupy the same space. Invite one to stay” — Maya Angelou

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One of my favourite things in this world is spotting when people separated by the vastest distance imaginable (time, place, perspective) write things so similar that they must hold some condensed truth.

In around 1930, Virginia Woolf wrote:

“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here forever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”

In December 2024, someone called @bluewmist on Twitter wrote:

you need to be slowmaxxing. you need to be reading long, fat books. you need to be making 48-hour chocolate chip cookies. you need to spend hours watching wildlife, you need to spend 15+ min making your coffee. you need to breathe in and breathe out. you need to be slowwwwwwwwwww.

Okay, so they’re slightly different. One of them has too many double Us to count. One of them is in the first person, from the perspective of a fictional character; one in the second, from the perspective of a chronically-online girlie. But ultimately, they’re expressing the same thing: The beauty, the wonder, of a slow life. (I think I like this little life).

Each year, I choose two words to live by. This year, they’re ‘slow’ and ‘hope’ — or, as chronically-online-girlies call them in 2025, ‘slowmaxxing’ and ‘hopecore’.* When I chose them, I didn’t think too critically about them. So I’ve only just noticed – literally, whilst I’ve been writing – that these two words have something very particular in common. They’re both about stepping away from the hustle and the bustle and the expectation. About turning inwards whilst also looking outwards. They conjure incense and slow-roasted vegetables and herbal teas and classical music and breathable fabrics and early nights and the scent of fresh lavender, somewhere, by the sea. Linen flapping on washing lines. A hand-made ceramic filled with two shots of espresso perched next to a book, faced down on the windowsill. Oh, a whole life exists within these two words.

And another thing that fits, snugly, into the space between these words? Fiction.

A realm built by language. An entire life – multiple lives, actually – for you to escape into. Whole worlds to live in, when this one gets too much. Which is my way of saying: reading is the best way to escape, without going anywhere. The best way to relax, without tidying or moving your body. The best way to empathise, without leaving your house. But if you’ve read this far, you already know that.

These books are not all easy. They wouldn’t fit into the #hopecore category of TikTok. But they’re emotionally truthful, and they’re incredibly written, and they make you want to dwell within their pages forever.* I don’t write about books that much on here, but I read all the time. I always have. So here are my top five reads of 2024 — and some of my favourite writers’ favourite reads of 2024 (because talking about books is one of my favourite things to do).