Recovery by Gavin Francis: Review and Giveaway
Just over a year ago, I reviewed Dr Gavin Francis’s Intensive Care, his record of the first 10 months of Covid-19, especially as it affected his work as a GP in Scotland. It ended up on my Best of 2021 list and is still the book I point people to for reflections on the pandemic. Recovery serves as a natural sequel: for those contracting Covid, as well as those who have had it before and may be suffering the effects of the long form, the focus will now be on healing as much as it is on preventing the spread of the virus. This lovely little book spins personal and general histories of convalescence, and expresses the hope that our collective brush with death will make us all more determined to treasure our life and wellbeing.
Francis remembers times of recovery in his own life: after meningitis at age 10, falling off his bike at 12, and a sinus surgery during his first year of medical practice. Refuting received wisdom about scammers taking advantage of sickness benefits (government data show only 1.7% of claims are fraudulent), he affirms the importance of a social safety net that allows necessary recovery time. Convalescence is subjective, he notes; it takes as long as it takes, and patients should listen to their bodies and not push too hard out of frustration or boredom.
Traditionally, travel, rest and time in nature have been non-medical recommendations for convalescents, and Francis believes they still hold great value – not least for the positive mental state they promote. He might also employ “social prescribing,” directing his patients to join a club, see a counsellor, get good nutrition or adopt a pet. A recovery period can be as difficult for carers as for patients, he acknowledges, and most of us will spend time as both.
I read this in December while staying with my convalescent mother, and could see how much of its practical advice applied to her – “Plan rests regularly throughout the day,” “Use aids to avoid bending and reaching,” “Set achievable goals.” If only everyone being discharged from hospital could be issued with a copy – pocket-sized and only just over 100 pages, it would be a perfect companion through any recovery period. I’d especially recommend this to readers of Maggie O’Farrell’s I Am, I Am, I Am and Christie Watson’s The Language of Kindness.
Favourite lines:
At one level, convalescence has something in common with dying in that it forces us to engage with our limitations, the fragile nature of our existence. Why not, then, live fully while we can?
If we can take any gifts or wisdom from the experience of illness, surely it’s this: to deepen our appreciation of health … in the knowledge that it can so easily be taken away.
Published by Profile Books/Wellcome Collection today, 13 January. My thanks to the publisher for the free copy for review.
*The Profile publicity team has offered a giveaway copy to be sent to one of my readers. If you’d like to be entered in the draw (UK only, sorry), please mention so in your comment below. I’ll choose a winner at random next Friday morning (the 21st) and contact them by e-mail.*
Bookish Time-Wasting Strategies
Being self-employed has certainly helped me develop better self-motivation and self-discipline, but that doesn’t mean I can’t still procrastinate with the best of them. When I do, though, I try to keep it book-related. Here are ten of my chief time-wasters:
- Requesting advance books via NetGalley and Edelweiss. I really don’t need any more books, but I can’t resist trawling the online listings to see what’s coming out in the next few months. It feels like a special treat to get to read favorite authors’ new books before they’re technically released – I have the new Jonathan Safran Foer, Maria Semple and Alexandra Kleeman books lined up to read soon.
- Checking out The Bookbag’s and Nudge’s offerings for reviewers. The same goes for these: more print ARCs on the pile is the last thing I need, but I simply have to know what they have for reviewers to choose from. Sometimes I come across books I’d never heard of, or ones I thought were only available in America. Still, I am trying to be very choosy about what I volunteer for.
- Browsing Goodreads giveaways. I’m going to sound like a broken record – I seem incapable of resisting free books, wherever they come from. Every few weeks I spend an hour or two occasionally switching over to the Goodreads giveaways page while I’m doing other things online. It takes some persistence to wade through all the rubbish to get to the entries for proper books you’d actually be interested in owning, but it can be worth it. Over the years I’ve won 49 books through Goodreads.
- Catching up on Twitter. I follow a ton of publishers, authors and publicists on Twitter. I am very bad about using the site regularly – I usually only remember to go on it when I have a blog to promote, and otherwise find it rather overwhelming – but when I do I often find information about a bunch of new-to-me books and see competitions to enter. I’ve won a couple of books and tote bags this way.
- Sorting through book-related clippings. I keep a file folder of clippings, mostly from the Guardian, related to books I think I’m likely to read. Every so often I go back through the file to find reviews of books I’ve read in the meantime, recycle ones I’m no longer interested in and so on.
- Rearranging my bedside books. Pretty much the same books have been on my nightstand shelves all year, but I’m constantly adjusting the piles to reflect their level of priority: review books are at the top, in chronological order by deadline; other rough piles are planned sets of reading. I take some glee in arranging these groups – adding a memoir here and a work of historical fiction there – all the while imagining how well they’ll complement each other.
- Organizing my Goodreads shelves. In addition to the standard “to read,” “read,” and “currently reading” shelves, I’ve set up a few dozen customized ones so that it’s easy for me to search my collection by theme. Recently I decided “illness and death” was a bit too broad of a descriptor so set up some more specific categories: “bereavement memoirs,” “cancer memoirs,” “old age,” etc.
- Culling the books on my Kindle. The digital collection is currently at 259 books. Every so often I take a long hard look at the e-books I’ve amassed and force myself to be honest about what I will actually read. If I don’t think I’m likely to read a book within the next year, I delete it. (These are all books I’ve downloaded for free, so it’s not like I’m throwing money away.)
- Looking up prices on webuybooks.co.uk. If you’re based in the UK, you probably already know about this website. I resell a bunch of books via Amazon, but sometimes the going rate is so low that you’re better off selling things as a job lot to WeBuyBooks. Their offer is often reasonable, and they frequently run deals where you can increase it by 10%. You box up the books and they send a courier to collect them from your front door – what could be easier?
- Ticking off books from lists. I don’t actively seek out books from 1001 Books You Must Read before You Die or the Guardian’s “1000 novels everyone must read” lists, but maybe once a year I go back through and tick off the ones I happen to have read recently.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 