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rachana's review
5.0
This book is a tremendous gift. There was something deeply satisfying about sitting down to read this with hot cups of oat milk and dark chocolate or with a dinner of warm pasta drowned in Parmesan cheese and white sauce.
It was the reference to the Edge Chronicles and the harvests from the Deepwoods that finally brought on a wave of nostalgia. I had read that series years ago craving earth apples and delberries. I was obsessed with the escape it gave me as a kid.
And there are so many beautiful, wonderful quotes in here:
'This is what Mum had tried to tell me. That eating would allow me to pursue the things I loved.'
'She wanted only for me to have enough energy to read books, go to school, then to university, to have friends...to sketch, to walk in the park, travel abroad, to have a life worth living.'
'When I read, when I walk, when I am taken out of myself I am quiet, my mind is steady.'
It was the reference to the Edge Chronicles and the harvests from the Deepwoods that finally brought on a wave of nostalgia. I had read that series years ago craving earth apples and delberries. I was obsessed with the escape it gave me as a kid.
And there are so many beautiful, wonderful quotes in here:
'This is what Mum had tried to tell me. That eating would allow me to pursue the things I loved.'
'She wanted only for me to have enough energy to read books, go to school, then to university, to have friends...to sketch, to walk in the park, travel abroad, to have a life worth living.'
'When I read, when I walk, when I am taken out of myself I am quiet, my mind is steady.'
jo_the_bookworm's review
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
hollsbookshelf's review
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Mental illness and Eating disorder
migalu23's review
hopeful
reflective
sad
medium-paced
5.0
This was an incredibly beautiful read I'll remember for a long time. For me, food has always been a joyful experience. My reading life has always been tied to food, too, so the concept fascinated me from the get-go.
The generosity with which Freeman shares the darkest moments of her anorexia gave me an understanding of an illness I can't even imagine. Somehow, even in those dark chapters, she lovingly weaves in descriptions of the most sumptuous and scrumptious literary feasts, powerful in their nostalgia and instantly warming.
But I think the parts of this books I will take with me are the moments of hope. In the relentless struggle with her mind Jabberwock, books provide solace and comfort, and a reminder that there's always another day. "And another, and another, and another yet to come."
The generosity with which Freeman shares the darkest moments of her anorexia gave me an understanding of an illness I can't even imagine. Somehow, even in those dark chapters, she lovingly weaves in descriptions of the most sumptuous and scrumptious literary feasts, powerful in their nostalgia and instantly warming.
But I think the parts of this books I will take with me are the moments of hope. In the relentless struggle with her mind Jabberwock, books provide solace and comfort, and a reminder that there's always another day. "And another, and another, and another yet to come."
Content Warnings
Graphic: Eating disorder
Moderate: Suicidal thoughts
Minor: Suicide
mado2022's review
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Eating disorder
Moderate: Eating disorder
Minor: Eating disorder
annintheforest's review
challenging
emotional
hopeful
reflective
slow-paced
4.0
A really gentle, honest and hopeful memoir, exploring what goes on in the mind of a person with anorexia, and how the books Laura read as an adult in recovery helped her find reasons for eating again
Content Warnings
Graphic: Body horror and Eating disorder
Minor: Fatphobia
florapants84's review
5.0
"For fifteen years before taking Bevis off the shelf, I had been hungry. Sometimes acutely so, sometimes less, but always going to bed each night empty and cold. For two of those fifteen years, I had been starving."
This was a delicious read! Laura Freeman takes us into her confidence, and shows how crippling anorexia was for her, and the years thereafter when she was recovering. A voracious reader from a young age, she read herself well with classics like Dickens, memoirists of WWI, and Virginia Woolf's fictitious meals and diary entries.
I've never made it through a Dickens novel; I've attempted David Copperfield and Oliver Twist at various stages of my life, and all unsuccessfully. Freeman went through all of his works in one year, looking for solace, comfort and appetite in the meals he wrote about and the characters that ate with such gusto.
She even goes back to reading children's classics that feature healthy relationships with food like The Wind in the Willows and Swallows and Amazons. Honestly, most of the books mentioned were books I haven't read yet. My To-Be-Read pile grew by a foot, and I can't wait to dive into them! The authors I'm most excited to read are food writers M.F.K. Fisher and Elizabeth David (authors I'm familiar with already). Unknown authors to me were travel writers like Patrick Leigh Fermor and Laurie Lee's autobiographical books about his walking travels after leaving Britain.
"Paddy's happy, effortless eating is perfected in Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese. At Kalamata in midsummer, with his girlfriend Joan and friend Xan Fielding, Paddy sits down to dinner above the quayside flagstones that throw back the heat like a casserole with the lid off. They step fully dressed into the sea and carry their table a few yards out, then three chairs. They sit up to their waists in cool water:
The waiter, arriving a moment later, gazed with surprise at the empty space on the quay; then, observing us with a quickly-masked flicker of pleasure, he stepped unhesitatingly into the sea, advanced waist deep with a butler's gravity, and, saying nothing more than 'Dinner-time', placed our meal before us—three beautifully grilled kephali, piping hot, and with their golden brown scales sparkling. To enjoy their marine flavour to the utmost, we dipped each by its tail for a second into the sea at our elbows."
Now that is mindful eating! I'm determined to work my way through all of Fermor's books! Not to be outdone, Woolf gets her own chapter! It was one of the most insightful and moving ones in the book. I've yet to read any Woolf, but she moved me so much!
"While Woolf has been the most extraordinary consolation—and no other writer has so helped me make sense of my own mind, nor offered such a rubric for how I might mend it—she is also a writer who frightens me. For long periods she succeeded in reigning in and stabling her galloping horses, tied them, kept them in hay. For years, she managed it. And this from her 1935 diary, January, when she was fifty-two:
'I wish I could find some way of composing my mind—It's absurd to let it be ravaged by scenes...On the contrary, it is better to pull on my galoshes & go through the gale to lunch off scrambled eggs & sausages.'
That is the remedy to: 'I can't fight any longer.' That is what I hold tight from Virginia Woolf. Galoshes. Courage. On."
I'm sitting in a hotel pub in Ireland looking over notes and pages from this book while a feast is laid before me as I write this review. Plenty of local people chatting each other up. It's great. I can't help but think of how much more I appreciate it after this book. It's a fab one. Get your hands on a copy!
lauraghitoi's review
5.0
This has got to be one of the most beautiful and poignant books I have read this year. Although I never struggled with my weight, body image or food, it helped me understand the lives and minds of those who do. So I must thank the author for that. I am beyond happy that Laura Freeman found the strength to write this book and I hope she will never stop writing.
ljbentley27's review
3.0
I am fully aware of the restorative power of good books. I once spent nearly six months bed bound and reading my way through my bookshelf. At the time of reading The Reading Cure I am on a 12 week Coronavirus lockdown and I am consuming books at a rapid pace. So whenever I see books that extol the healing power of reading I will always be drawn to them.
What I found with The Reading Cure is a memoir that his heartbreakingly beautiful and a writer – Laura Freeman – who talks about books with such passion that I count help but feel compelled to read more about her. If I am honest, I didn’t know who Laura Freeman was before reading her book but what I found was a vulnerable girl who was fighting a daily battle but also a girl that was winning. It may not seem that she has massive scream from the roof top victories but the victories that she had were very uplifting to read about.
After reading The Reading Cure I know I will be paying a lot more attention to the food featured in books.
The Reading Cure – How Books Restored My Appetiteby Laura Freeman is available now.
What I found with The Reading Cure is a memoir that his heartbreakingly beautiful and a writer – Laura Freeman – who talks about books with such passion that I count help but feel compelled to read more about her. If I am honest, I didn’t know who Laura Freeman was before reading her book but what I found was a vulnerable girl who was fighting a daily battle but also a girl that was winning. It may not seem that she has massive scream from the roof top victories but the victories that she had were very uplifting to read about.
After reading The Reading Cure I know I will be paying a lot more attention to the food featured in books.
The Reading Cure – How Books Restored My Appetiteby Laura Freeman is available now.
cerim's review
3.0
The writing here is stunning but something just didn’t quite hit the mark for me - I have a strained relationship with food myself and genuinely found some of the passages here quite a slog to get through.