I think this might have been a short story published in Cricket Magazine in the 1980s – early 90s, perhaps with Quentin Blake illustrations? It was a short story that told about a reader that had a voracious appetite for books AND for any food that was mentioned in the books they read. If the character in a book was drinking tea, the reader had to have tea, and so on.
The memory of this story has plagued me for years, I’d love very much to read it again.
Stump the Bookseller
New format, same book stumper solving.
I remember this too, from Cricket Magazine, but it would have been from the 1970’s. (Maybe they recycled content?) In my memory it was nonfiction, an account of the writer’s actual reading habits as a kid.
Yes! It could be in a 1970s issue- my mother started my subscription in the 1980s, but we also purchased back issues at garage sales, so I bet it was in one of those!
Agreed – I think I recall this as a nonfictional anecdote retold in Sarah Ellis’s “The Young Writer’s Companion” notebook in the late 1990s. I’m pretty sure that it was about a male author of children’s books from the United States, and that his parents had an interesting time trying to match some of the dishes described (I think there was some kind of pudding from Victorian England). Maybe Maurice Sendak? I’ll follow up if I find anything relevant.
Solved! It was the essay “A Hungry Reader” by Lloyd Alexander in Cricket Magazine, September 1973.