Lucy Mangan says: ‘I have lived so many lives through books’. As a fellow bookworm I share the joy of childhood books, but that’s not quite the same as experiencing joy at reading Bookworm.
I liked the story of Lucy’s family and her childhood as a bookworm but the frequent references to her curled up with a book did start to pall a little.
I also liked the way that she gives a potted history of children’s literature through her own reading. But the truth is that I liked it best when she dwell on the books I loved - we are only five or six years apart in age - and that didn’t happen enough. I was shattered when she all but dismissed my childhood obsession, Anne of Green Gables!
Would I recommend it? It was a pleasant enough read, so probably. Will you love it? If your reading tastes diverge and you’re interested enough in Lucy and childhood literature, then quite possibly.

With her usual blend of humour and intelligence Mangan talks us through the books that were important to her during her childhood. From the brightly coloured board format which are her earliest memory of books (and, as for most children in the past 40-odd years, the Very Hungry Caterpillar plays a pivotal role), through picture books, chapter books for newly confident readers and longer stories we meet all her favourites. And the best bit, for me, is that many of them are my favourites too - I have also spent hours lost in Wonderland and Narnia, discovering adventures on the other side of the Tollbooth and the walls of the Secret Garden. Along the way we also meet the rest of the Mangan family - the Dad of few words, the no-nonsense Mum and the sister with a secret science facility hidden behind the sofa (probably...) - and hear about plans to try to make her own youngster into a reader. She tells stories of her passion for reading which resonated with me (and would probably sound very familiar to my own Mum and siblings) - I used to have to be thrown out of the classroom at playtime and would often be found hiding under a desk with a book - and she makes very many good points about the value of reading to the young. In the stories she discusses children can learn, in a safe way, about growing up, about life and death, about emotions and about the joys and the perils of childhood. As adults we can read these books and remember what it was like to be a child: alternately brilliant and scary.

This is a must-read for all you life-long bookworms out there, you know who you are. Since the age of 6, sat on your bed or the sofa with your nose in a book, with your mum hoovering around your feet. I have holiday pics of me aged about 8 or 9 on a Greek island, my dad waterskiing, my sister frollicking in the sea, and me sitting on a rock with my hair in a scarf, sunglasses on, a book propped open on my knees, oblivious to everything going on around me. I think if I didn't give books away every now and then (yes it's true, well there are some books I read believe it or not that I'm not keen on and thus don't want to keep), my house would look how Lucy Mangan's sounds.

On the whole, I related well to most of the books Lucy talks about reading while growing up. She's about 8 years younger than me, and surpisingly that's made a difference in her teen choice of books. She talks about Sweet Valley High, but when I was a teen I was reading a whole range of adult books from Daphne du Maurier's 'Rebecca' to Jilly Cooper's 'Riders', Nevil Shute's 'A Town Like Alice', George Eliot's 'Silas Marner'. I don't remember there being a craze for reading amongst my school contemporaries - I always felt that I was the only one reading.

Also, Lucy talks about books she loved when she was less than 5, picture books and such. I don't remember anything like that. The earliest books I remember being my absolute favourites were Milly Molly Mandy (which Lucy also talks about, which I love her for) and Mrs Pepperpot. But picture books like The Very hungry Caterpillar, or Dr Seuss - nope. But that may be because my sister and I weren't read to by our parents? I don't know, I don't like to ask them in case that was the case and I make them feel guilty.

However, Lucy's whole section from Milly Molly Mandy upto about age 12 I could totally relate to, and I just adored her descriptions of them, and why she was totally in love with them. Lucy also had a great sense of humour, and had me laughing out loud in a few places. The one downside to her writing was her extremely over-long sentences. Oh my goodness, they were so long I would lose the thread and have to start it again. Hyphens, brackets, commas - gosh, as soon as I saw one coming, I'd gloss over it and start the next sentence. Not ideal.

Apart from that, this is a lovely book to read to evoke those wonderful moments when it was just you and a book. Let the world carry on around you.

I found Bookworm a delight. It's a book about the joy of childhood reading, probably more so that about the books themselves, and I think Lucy Mangan captures the experience of being a bookish child beautifully.

I'm about 20 years older than Mangan, but I know a lot of the books she talks about and I think she talks about them and their effect with real love, humaity and understanding - including that thing about books you were supposed to like but didn't. I always felt as though I had some dreadful flaw because I didn't much like Babar or Swallows & Amazons, for example, so it's lovely to have an ally.

There's some very shrewd (and very readable) analysis as well as capturing the experience so well. For example, there's a great section on the appeal of Enid Blyton and of the problematic side of her books. You don’t have to agree with what Mangan says (although I largely do) to appreciate the clarity and insight of the points she makes. She is very good at remembering the child's point of view as well as having a balanced, humane adult perspective and a sensible notion of children's ability to survive and gain from what some adults may think they need to be protected against.

And, by the way, she's very funny.

Obviously, there are overlaps between my childhood reading and Mangan's, just as there are many books she read that I didn't and vice versa, and most readers will find the same. I still found that I enjoyed much of what she writes about the books I don't know, although I did indulge in a bit of judicious skimming here and there. She writes with such engaging enthusiasm and wit that it's all a pleasure to read – and anyway, someone who loves The Phantom Tollbooth as much as I do is plainly sound to the core.

In short, if you loved reading as a child, I think you'll love Bookworm as I did. Very warmly recommended.

(My thanks to Vintage for an ARC via NetGalley.)

I absolutely loved this witty and entertaining memoir which led me down a reading memory lane. The author and I loved so many of the same books! A great read which I highly recommend.

This was enjoyable to read, I could relate to a lot of the book in regards to the love of reading, some I could not as it was a little OTT but I enjoyed it and would recommend

I tried really hard to get onto this book but it was tough going. It’s a memoir of childhood reading. She tells us all about the authors she grew up with and how she became a bookworm, but its more of a history lesson. At times it dragged on and I found my focus drifting. I'd put the book down to go do something else and completely forgot about it, then would force myself to continue until, I could no longer. I really wanted to enjoy this book, its synopsis sounding so appealing.

This is my kind of book. A book about books. A book about how people are affected and shaped by books. And Lucy Mangan has chosen a winning strategy by choosing to write about books we remember from our childhood. She now has a small child of her own and is starting to read him the books that were read to her as a child and this causes her to contemplate her favourites and how she chose them and how her life became focussed on them.

This is a rich exploration of all sorts of children's literature - the good and the bad. The stories are described, the authors are discussed and the impact on Ms Mangan and the children at the time and since are touched on. We get Roald Dahl, Enid Blyton, we meet Struwelpeter and the Hungry Caterpillar again. But this is more than just a catalogue of books. This is Ms Mangan's childhood via books and I identified with so many elements of it despite our vastly different childhood circumstances.

"Later he showed me that the family dictionary could also teach me the correct pronunciation of 'skein' and 'lumme' and - a moment's further investigation soon revealed, ALL OTHER WORDS TOO. It could even unpack the likes of dodecahedron for you... I don't think I'll ever get over the amazement of realising that a word could contain such multitudes and explain it's own meaning to you as it went about its daily business."

"As my cornflake packet dependency attests, by this point reading had evolved from a simple pleasure to an actual need. It wasn't just my preferred activity any longer but an addiction, albeit of the most benign and valuable kind. It was almost physically painful to be kept from it. Every other activity was an interruption, a depredation on a time that could be better spent."

I totally got the feelings here. I remember the wonder of discovering the dictionary and I did indeed read cornflake packets or whatever was on the table when I was made to put down my book. I am delighted that a writer of this quality captured those feelings for me and this is a book I will reread.

Recommended for any new parent, any bookworm and anyone who is living with a bookworm and doesn't understand the fascination of books.

I was given a copy of this book by Netgalley in return for an honest review.

My thanks to NetGalley and Random House, UK for what turned out to be a quite lovely read for me. I’d also like to add a thank you to my goodreads friend Susan for mentioning this book, else I mayn’t have come across it.

<i>Bookworm</i> quite simply can be described as the author’s memoirs of her childhood reading, and it is that, but also so so much more. The author, Lucy Mangan, takes us through her reading from the days she was read to, to when she began reading herself, through till her teens, and eventual transition into grown-up books. From <i>The Very Hungry Caterpillar</i> to <i>Mog the Cat</i>, <i>Babar</i> the Elephant to <i>Topsy and Tim</i>, Miffy, Milly Molly Mandy, Rumer Godden, Blyton, Beverley Clearly, school stories, dystopian literature, <i>All of a Kind Family</i>, Dr Seuss, Dahl, Narnia, Nesbit, William, Burnett, to Sweet Valley High and Judy Blume and more present-day books like the Harry Potter books and Hunger Games books―this has it all, and much much more (a real feast of children’s literature). And it isn’t just about the books themselves and the joy that they brought Mangan as a child but also the things about life and people that various books taught her, or rather opened her eyes to, and of course how she relates to or appreciates these as an adult. She also writes about children’s literature itself, how it has evolved over the years, about illustrators and their visions of/approaches to their work, and also different genres and how they developed.

Starting this book, the first thing that caught my eye (and probably does every other reader’s) was the little illustration at the beginning of each chapter―a cat, a teddy bear, a school hat―this changes with every chapter and relates in some way to it, and I thought it a delightful touch. I also really enjoyed the writing―Mangan is not only witty, she has a knack for describing the books themselves and her feelings about them just perfectly. One can “feel” her love for them (and for bookish spaces), and how she is enraptured by the books, the characters, the stories, and the illustrations (the section on illustration was among my favourites). One can’t help being affected by her enthusiasm (of course one is probably already enthusiastic about books to start with). Also reading the book, I couldn’t help but reminiscing about my own childhood reading, in which there was quite a bit (though not all( in common with the author’s―mine was a lot of Enid Blyton like hers (but I have a grouse about that part that I’ll come to), Burnett, Heidi, Alcott, Topsy and Tim, among others, though while the author went through a Sweet Valley phase (these were books I’ve never read though I remember other children in my school reading them), my phase around that time with a similar type (conglomerate-produced) of book was Nancy Drew―I read pretty much all I could get my hands on, the original books, the files, even the supermysteries (that featured both Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys in one), and I also read related series like the Hardy Boys books, and Dana Girls. (Writing this down I realise that this probably has to do with my love for mystery/detective stories in general, which extends to my current reading as well.) But not to get carried away, my point was her sentiments were ones I could really relate to, much of the time. Another point on which I agree with the author is the needlessness of “updating” books to make them more relatable, editing out period specific features―I mean if books had to be relatable, why at all do we need to learn about other cultures or parts of the world, they aren’t things we see and do in our daily lives, are they? Why learn history at all?

The Enid Blyton chapter in this book was the one that I was looking forward to the most and that was the one that turned out to disappoint me a little as well. While I agree with her response to many of the criticisms against Blyton, the fact that she finds Blyton unreadable as an adult (reiterated elsewhere in the book) was something that I just couldn’t digest. I loved EB as a child and I still do, I still read her and love her books (may be I am more critical of them and notice things that I mayn’t have as a child), so does my mother, so does a friend who only began to enjoy her as an adult and loves Ern and Fatty and Snubby and Barney as I do (and this is a very well read someone), and so does a whole group of EB fans of various ages I am part of on Facebook. Her Findouters mysteries (so many of them) have solutions I still find interesting, the imagination she shows in her “fantasy” books like the faraway tree books is something that always delights (and amazes), and her quite good knowledge of nature and animals reflects in some of her fiction series (the ‘Adventure’ books, for instance, or the Adventures of Pip for that matter) as well as in her non-fiction. And she doesn’t deal with only light themes, one only had to read, say, the Six Cousins books to see that. Yes, I do realise this is the author’s personal opinion but I couldn’t help but be disappointed by it (kind of like the author’s own reaction to Richmal Crompton’s opinion of her William books―not to compare the books themselves of course).

But anyway, at the end of it all, this is a great book for Bookworms in general and lovers of children’s literature in particular. Like me you will probably have added quite a bit to your TBR at the end of it, so be prepared to do a lot of book shopping. But also be warned, there are some spoilers along the way (not in every case, but you are told once in a way which characters, er… pop off, etc.) so in case there are books you’re planning to read from those she mentions, may be you’d want to skip a para or two. Four and a half stars!

What could be more perfect for a bookworm than to read about her favourite pursuit by journeying with a fellow hooked-on-books person as she shares how reading has shaped her life, book by book? Especially as there are delicious snippets about authors, background information about how various books came to be written and reasons given why certain reading material has had such a strong hold on her.

This childhood reading memoir is a great nostalgia trip as well. We get to revisit childhood favourites, reminisce over familiar volumes and discover others we inadvertently seem to have missed. Because who gets to read all they really want to?

The only slight disappointment here is the author's scant regard for poetry. As a poet myself I was saddened by that, because poetry is a tremendous vehicle for literacy. It’s particularly appealing to the young and a great introduction to savouring the sound of words.

But that's a minor discrepancy in an otherwise engaging, totally relatable book with much to redeem it. Readers will vary in their preferences but we are all agreed that nothing else quite beats curling up with a good book—and being left alone while we do so, of course. I love this thought, where the author speaks to fretful parents worried about their offspring’s reading habit:

"Be glad of all the benefits it will bring, rather than lamenting the fresh air avoided, the friendships not made, the parties not attended, the exercise not taken, the body of rewarding and potentially lucrative activities, hobbies and skills not developed. Leave us be. We’re fine. More than fine. Reading’s our thing."

It was a joy to read this intriguing, light-hearted book. I had my eyes opened to those I wished I had read as a child and lots of inspiration on what to choose to help foster a good reading habit in my grandson. Highly recommended for bookworms.

It was a great joy reading Bookworm. You get a loving portrait of an uprooted Northern family, with beautifully drawn characters. You also get a great voyage of discovery into Lucy Mangan's formative years through books. As a bookworm parent of a bookworm child, there was so much to identify with. Like Lucy, I have a very special place in my heart for Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar. A bookworm once is a bookworm forever, munching through every book of a certain author while civilizations rise and fall outside.
I think it is mandatory for every bookworm to have an Enid Blyton obsession. Lucy Mangan perfectly describes the need to read as much Blyton as possible, followed by the inevitable realization that the writing is really not that great. Lucy manages to take you back to being that child who needs to be left alone to read White Boots until the thing is finished, just as I had to read all of Bookworm in one sitting.

https://www.librarything.com/work/17111169

This book is a delight for anyone who was an avid reader as a child. Reading about Lucy’s bookish childhood and her favourite reads took me back to my own days spent in the local library. Many of her favourites were mine too, others I’ll now put in the reading list. Highly recommended.

The Blurb
The Cat in the Hat? Barbar? The Very Hungry Caterpillar? Whoever it was for you, it’s very hard to forget the vivid intensity of your first encounter with a book.

As a bespectacled young bookworm, Lucy Mangan devoured books: from early picture books, to Swallows and Amazons, Enid Blyton to Little Women, and from trashy teen romances to her first proper ‘grown-up’ novels. In Bookworm, she revisits this early enthusiasm; celebrating the enduring classics, and disinterring some forgotten treasures.

This is a love letter to the joys of childhood reading, full of enthusiasm and wit, telling the colourful story of our best-loved children's books, the extraordinary people who created them, and the thousand subtle ways they shape our lives. It also comes packed with brilliant recommendations to inspire the next generation of bookworms and set them on their way.

This impassioned book will bring the unforgettable characters of our collective childhoods back to life – prompting endless re-readings, rediscoveries, and, inevitably, fierce debate. It will also act as an invaluable guide to anyone looking to build a children’s library and wondering where to start, or where to go next.

What I Thought
After Sunflowers In February leaving me feeling a little disappointed I couldn't have moved on to a better book.

Lucy took me on a journey that I could have written and evoked so many happy memories of past, childhood reads.  She shared a brief, interesting history about children's publishing, along with some humorous family memories.  

This book stirred up memories of old favourites as well as some books I had forgotten about.  She also shared a couple I haven't read and intend to seek out if I can.  An absolutely brilliant read, especially for self-proclaimed bookworms like me.  Highly recommended and easily my favourite read of the year so far.

Favourite Quotes
"Leave us be.  We're fine.  More than fine.  Reading's our thing"

"'Pallid' says my sister, peering over my shoulder as I type this. 'Bespectacled, Friendless.' Which is also true.And yet, who needed flesh-and-blood friends when I had Jo March, Charlotte, Wilbur and everyone at Malory Towers at my beck and call?"

"you simply never know what a child is going to find in a book (or a graphic novel, or a comic, or whatever) - what tiny, throwaway line might be the spark that lights the fuse that sets off an explosion in understanding whose force echoes through the years"

"'He's reading!'  More often than not, I tiptoe back to watch.  I can practically see the stream of glittering words flowing into his mind, giving him new names for things, teaching him in some fundamental way that nothing else can manage"

"At most they will spend a few days tapping the backs of wardrobes hopefully (yes, I did - well, only the old wooden one in the spare room.  All the others in the house were white-melamine-covered chipboard)"

"Sendak's favourite fan, though, was a little boy who sent him a card with a little drawing on it.  Out of respect for a fellow artist, Sendak went to some trouble with his reply and included a little drawing of his own - of a wild thing - to the boy.  He got a letter back from the boy's mother which said 'Jim loved your card so much he ate it.'  Sendak considered it the highest compliment he had ever been paid.  'He didn't care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything.  He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.'"

As a retired children's librarian, this book was right up my street. A canter through the books the author read aa child, an introduction to those books to her son, and a quick potted history of books for children from the beginning.
She describes all the books of my childhood, some I was introduced to when I took my own daughter to the library, and some that have become "classics" in more recent times, and which I have shared with my two grandsons.
I love the references to people like Louisa Alcott, Shirley Hughes, and Eric Carle, including their back stories, and the descriptions of things like The Family from One End Street, and all Enid Blyton's back catalogue.
This was a delightful read, and I am very grateful to the publishers and Net Galley for allowing me chance to read it.

Part memoir, part overview of how publishing for children has evolved and part love letter to some childhood favourite reads, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading by Lucy Mangan will make you want to revisit the books that shaped your own childhood.

Full of heart and humour, reading Bookworm is like receiving a hug from a long-lost bookish friend!

Lucy Mangan leads readers through a long distance reading journey with map, compass and excellent orienteering skills

Oh heavens, I didn’t want to get to Journey’s End, I really didn’t. This is an utterly delicious romp up hill and down dale through a childhood’s (Lucy’s) adventures between the covers of books.

Now Lucy was born in the 70s. She is not of my generation, so some of her childhood reads were certainly books I had never heard of, never mind read, but I just didn’t care, and chomped up, with equal delight, travels through books known and unknown. She also details experiences (as an adult I assume) with the whole history of childhood reading, indeed the production, the when and the why, of books written for children, whether, as in the high Victorian era, to morally educate and save young souls from temptation, or, - revolutionary, to entertain, to open up worlds, to surrender to with blazing delight.

IF you are a lifelong reader, IF you fell upon being read to with feverish delight and anticipation, but BURNED to take control of this for yourself, IF you still half regret the loss of that falling-in-love with reading, a kind of entrance into Paradise, DO NOT WAIT A MOMENT LONGER – you must have this book, you must read it, like you must draw breath.

This is an utterly joyous journey through the literature of childhood, from the earliest days of putting strange shaped squiggles together and suddenly grasping that c a t (for example) meant something – well, I guess that moment is equal to the moment serious greybeards first began to decode hieroglyphs.

Magic, that’s what

But Mangan is not only a wonderful chronicler of literature for children (the academic analysis) she is brilliantly right there within the experience of the exposure at the time of a child’s reading. She writes with as much joy and gusto as she reads

Pointless to describe the waystations on her journey, but this book is as much to be filed in Humour (she is one gloriously witty woman) as it is in Biography or factual tome about the history of children’s literature

Rarely has a book simultaneously made me laugh out loud so much whilst also educating me

Suffice it to say, Mangan had me, firmly following her guided tour, from this, early comment

“Was your first crush on Dickon instead of Johnny Depp? Do you still get the urge to tap the back of a wardrobe if you find yourself alone in a strange bedroom”

To which I could only shout YES! YES! Even if Johnny Depp was not yet a crushable entity when I first ‘crushed’ Dickon

I was delighted to be offered this as a review copy as a digital ARC, and, have discovered to my delight that Mangan has written other books. WHICH I SHALL BE BUYING.

My only cavil (and I don’t know whether this was purely ‘digital ARC challenge’ or not) is that the author’s delightful habit of footnote and footnote within footnote asides does not work well in the digital format. It would work perfectly on a printed page, where the visual signs of long footnotes can happily spill over several pages without reader confusion.

Thank you, Lucy Mangan. This book has brought me so much pleasure. I have relished every word, laughed out loud and been bathed in a warm, nostalgic glow which has made me late back from tea breaks and almost missing bus stops. I found myself yearning for a “snow day” so I could just stay at home and fully immerse myself in the author’s childhood.

Lucy Mangan truly deserves the title “Bookworm”. Reading, as a child, at every opportunity, eschewing social situations and getting through vast numbers of books makes her a true authority on children’s literature from a child’s perspective. I didn’t think I read as much when I was young as I do now but I realised I must have done as a sizeable number of books Lucy devoured I had also read. She is a few years younger than me but the world of juvenile publishing did not move as fast as it does today and many of the books in our libraries and schools in the 70’s had been published a generation before. I didn’t come from a home with a lot of books and whereas Lucy’s Dad provided her with a regular supply from when she was quite young, my Dad tended to do the same for me with comics. I have two older sisters so much of their abandoned reading material became mine, because as Lucy rightly points out as a child the bookworm will read whatever is available, so my knowledge of books involving characters such as My Naughty Little Sister, or set in girls boarding schools or about girls with ponies (the last being my sister Val’s staple reading diet) is probably greater than most of the men who will read this book.

Lucy is lucky enough to still possess her childhood books. She obviously didn’t have a mother so keen to donate “treasures” to jumble sales to either be sold for a few paltry pennies or occasionally bought back by myself.

Her memoir reinforces the importance of libraries. I can still remember the very first library book I borrowed, (it was a picture book version of “Peter And The Wolf” with a yellow cover. I took it out many times) so that experience obviously firmly imprinted itself in my West London mind as much as it did for Lucy on the South of the River in Catford.

Some of the titles alone brought back great memories – “Family Of One End Street”, “Tom’s Midnight Garden”, “The Saturdays” “The Phantom Tollbooth”, “The Secret Garden”, “Charlie & The Chocolate Factory”, “Lion Witch & The Wardrobe”, The “William” novels were all great favourites with both Lucy and myself. (No mention of a couple of others I was obsessed by “Emil & The Detectives” and “Dr Doolittle”, maybe they were moving out of public favour by then). She shares her strength of feelings against certain things, she had a limited tolerance of talking animals and fantasy (which saw off both “Babar The Elephant” and Tolkien) and does so in a way which is both stimulating and very funny.

Through the books she read we learn much about her family life which brings in a whole new level of richness into the work. I’m also totally with her on the subject of re-reading, which in my teaching days was often a bugbear for some parents who wanted their children to forge ever onwards to “harder” books. She puts this over masterfully;

“The beauty of a book is that it remains the same for as long as you need it. It’s like being able to ask a teacher or parent to repeat again and again some piece of information or point of fact you haven’t understood with the absolute security of knowing that he/she will do so infinitely. You can’t wear out a book’s patience.”

As well as examining the past she looks to the future and to her own young son, not yet so fussed about reading and announces “It is my hope that our son will read our amalgamated collection and become the world’s first fully rounded person.” I love that!

Expect perceptive insights on all the major players and books from the period – from the still very popular Enid Blyton (“She was national comfort reading at a time when mental and emotional resources were too depleted to deal with anything more complex”), the religious elements (which also completely passed me by as a child) of CS Lewis (“no child ever has or will be converted to Christianity by reading about Cair Paravel, Aslan, naiads, dryads, hamadryads, fauns and all the rest. If they notice it at all, they are far more likely to be narked than anything else. And they probably won’t notice it at all.”), the development of the first person narrative dating from E Nesbit’s “Story Of The Treasure Seekers” to her 80’s obsession with “Sweet Valley High” (that whole publishing phenomenon passed me by as I was no longer a child by then). The joys of reading pile up one after another in this book. I cannot imagine enjoying a book about children’s literature more. It is an essential read for all of us who like to look back and who like to feel we are still young at heart!

Bookworm was published as a hardback by Square Peg in March 2018 . Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the review copy.

If you were the kind of child who took books to bed instead of stuffed toys, then you absolutely MUST read this book. It’s hilarious, so very relatable and a wonderful trip down memory lane!

Sort of like Gogglebox – but for readers – Lucy Mangan’s Bookworm is a memoir of childhood reading, from The Very Hungry Caterpillar right through to Sweet Valley High and Judy Blume.

A card-carrying bookworm, Mangan is the owner of 10,000 unattractive books (she was once interviewed by a bookcollecting magazine about it – they were perplexed that she didn’t collect ‘beautiful’ editions). For Mangan, it’s all about the stories:

For the true bookworm, life doesn’t really begin until you get hold of your first book.

My own mother tells me that her life changed when I learned how to read. By which I infer that I finally left her the hell alone for five minutes at a time.

As a fellow bookworm, I made so many notes while reading this I could fill my own novella. I spent half the book internally shouting ‘YES!’. Like this passage:

"Remember hiding a book on your lap to get yourself through breakfast? Remember getting hit on the head by footballs in the playground because a game had sprung up around you while you were off in Cair Paravel?"

I very clearly remember spending an entire – wonderful – day in front of the gas heater when I was 16, reading David Copperfield. It didn’t quite fit with my school-time persona – the one with the long, bottle blonde hair, dating the tall musician from an outer suburban boys’ school – but we bookworms often learn to fit into the social strata eventually. It doesn’t mean we stop reading.

On being a bookworm & parenting small children…

My youngest child recently started school and I’m delighting in watching him learn how to read. This is the kid who takes books to bed like other kids take teddies but who, for some reason, has resisted all my offers of reading tuition over the years. Sometimes his taste in books baffles me. On this, Mangan laments:

"My own child won’t give [In the Night Kitchen] the time of day. But I read it to him every month or so regardless. Not only is it a Caldecott book, it’s Mummy’s favourite. He should like it. And by God, we will continue until he does."

For my own children, There’s a Hippopotamus on our Roof Eating Cake is my torture weapon of choice.

Finding time to indulge your own reading addiction becomes incredibly difficult with young children. With two kids aged 5 and 7, I read snippets of books now between ‘Look at this, Mum!’ and ‘I’m hungry!’ and ‘He hit me!’ but it hasn’t stopped me from reading. When they were still in nappies, I read the entire Hunger Games trilogy on my phone while sitting in front of ABC Kids television. Mangan gets it:

"I have great hopes for retirement but for the moment, as an adult of working age and a mother of a five-year-old, life is unfortunately too much with me to allow such gorgeous, uninterrupted stretches of immersion in a book."

AND she even understands the bookworm’s unique confusion on parenting a non-bookworm:

"…he is nearly six at the time of writing… I literally don’t know what to do with him. By this age, I didn’t need parenting, just feeding and rotating every few hours on the sofa to prevent pressure sores. I am entirely adrift. Please send help."

Don’t read Bookworm if you didn’t grow up with a book in your hand. Bookworm is like an introvert’s book club where you’re expected to have read at least a dozen books to join. For example, I’d never heard of (the apparently wildly famous and successful book) The Phantom Tollbooth, so I ended up skipping the whole section because none of it made a whole lot of sense to me.

The saddest part of the whole book was when Mangan completely destroyed the entire Twilight series for me. Although admittedly, it was probably about time somebody did…

"Over the course of the book(s) Bella becomes more and more passive, training herself not to respond to his kisses (when she does respond, he draws away and berates her for endangering herself), gradually isolating herself from her friends and family in order to protect his secret, and generally learning to subordinate her every impulse and desire to the need not to upset Edward and his instincts. You don’t have to squint too hard to see dubious parallels between this and the real-life dynamic of abusive relationships."

Lucy Mangan writes passionately about how books and reading shaped her childhood. She provides plenty of historical background and context to her personal survey of children's literature. Her thoughts on how we read as children are very relatable and encourage the reader to reminisce about their own favourites as well as to discover some new ones.