Reviews with content warning for Medical content - Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

Reviews tagging 'Medical content'

Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May

18 reviews

linneak's review against another edition

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emotional informative inspiring reflective relaxing fast-paced

4.25

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gatorskulls's review

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hopeful reflective sad fast-paced

3.0

I somehow missed when adding this to my TBR that it was a memoir... That's on me lol. The writing was beautiful but i found it extremely repetitive and not as instructional as I thought it would be. Maybe if I read this book 2 years ago I would've enjoyed it more. The author seems to be speaking from a relatively privileged background, so I found the insights a bit unrelatable. That isn't to discount May's experiences at all, but reading Rest Is Resistance by Tricia Hersey before reading Wintering made it feel like it was missing something.

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shelfofunread's review against another edition

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challenging emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

4.5

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myk_yeah's review

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hopeful inspiring reflective relaxing medium-paced

5.0

Simply amazing. This book soothed the parts of me that feel bad for feeling bad. May reflects on how it's okay to feel bad. Life does contain suffering. And that slowing down in the winter (whether it's a season of the earth or a season of your life) is natural.

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midwichtriffid's review against another edition

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challenging hopeful informative inspiring reflective relaxing sad slow-paced

5.0

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atamano's review

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hopeful reflective medium-paced

4.0

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experimentalaudioscene's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional hopeful inspiring reflective relaxing medium-paced

3.5

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bluejayreads's review against another edition

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reflective slow-paced

3.0

Objectively, this is not a fantastic book. It's significantly more memoir than self-help, and a rambling one at that. It starts out solid, introducing the concept of wintering as an emotional season, parallelling not necessarily correlating with the season in nature. She discusses what the season feels like, the symptoms, and a few very general thoughts about how to get through such seasons. Then she loses the main thread and talks about various vignettes of her life, from seeing the Northern Lights to her son's first blizzard, ending with an extended discussion of the benefits of swimming in ice water. I appreciated it because it gave a name and explanation to what I'm going through right now, but it's unfocused and doesn't provide much advice for what to do when you're in an emotional winter.

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krys_kilz's review

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emotional hopeful reflective medium-paced

3.0

This book fell a little flat for me. The opening and closing chapters were the strongest, but the middle felt a bit scattered and redundant. It's also hard for me to read a middle class person emphasizing the importance of rest and retreat when that is not something that's truly available to the vast majority of people.

I did love May's emphasis on change being inevitable and her passages about how we try to hide and erase grief instead of tending to it. I also liked the exploration of how out of sync industrial society is with life - whether that's seasonal shifts, sleep patterns, or changes in daylight - and how connecting to folklore and creating new practices can offer a path towards making meaning.

There was an element of universalism that I did not like. I think it would be more accurate and appropriate for May to have spoken only from her own experience and cultural context rather than generalizing what life is like. Generalizations like that flatten and erase so many other experiences.

"...life is, by its very nature, uncontrollable...we should stop trying to finalize our comfort and security, and instead find a radical acceptance of the endless, unpredictable change that is the very essence of this life."

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olivia_piepmeier's review

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hopeful inspiring reflective relaxing medium-paced

4.5

Just as I read Eat, Pray, Love at the perfect time, so was my reading of this book during my own wintering. It's an interesting mix of general non-fiction, memoir, and self-help focused on the season of winter but somewhat abstractly. While it was released in 2020, I'm sure if May had experienced the pandemic at the time of writing, it would be quite different but also...not really? Much of what she says in this feels applicable to pandemic life in a way that would have been helpful to encounter earlier in the pandemic. I think a lot of my enjoyment came from seeing myself in it. As a long time fan of winter-as-season, this helped me see some of the subconscious reasoning. It also helped me feel more secure in my desire and decision to pause and see what's next as I recover from challenging times.

It would be a nice book to start reading around November when the "threat" of winter feels a little dreadful but anyone that feels they might need a pause would find something in this.

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