I related to this book so hard it could easily be my own memoir of childhood reading. Oh, I didn’t read exactly the same books as Lucy Mangan, and I didn’t feel the same as she did about others, but this account of her early life spent between the pages of a dizzying array of children’s fiction, and her adult perceptions of those books now, just sang to me as I don’t think any other memoir ever has.
Mangan is wry and clever and self-deprecatory and amusing, and this book did so much to make me appreciate not only children’s books as a whole — she seeds a lot of research about the history of the genre, from its early, prosy religious instructional works to the powerhouse bestsellers of today — but the ones I read myself that it made me want to do nothing so much as return to those enchanted worlds, and explore some of the others that I missed out on, but that Mangan recommends so enthusiastically.
This is a must-read book for every lifelong bookworm.
She’s wrong about Twilight, though.
SCORECARD
TBR DAY 211: Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading by Lucy Mangan
GENRE: Non-Fiction
PUBLISHED: 2018
TIME ON THE TBR: ~9 months.
PURCHASED FROM: Christmas gift.
KEEP: Yes!
It is among my greatest shames that I do not like Studio Ghibli films. From Princess Mononoke to Ponyo to Porco Rosso, these Japanese animated features are considered masterpieces of the anime art, but for all that I have been steadily exploring that fertile playground over the past few years (hi, Tristan, my partner in weekly anime nights!), I still have not been able to work up the least enthusiasm for these .
Mark Twain is, of course, famously amusing, and this slim volume — which brings together two short stories written in the early 1900s, towards the end of the genius satirist’s life — is possibly his most hilarious work. To me, anyway. I am always up for a Biblical satire, and this one is top quality.
Last year, Netflix announced a forthcoming television adaptation of this American children’s classic, and the very next day I saw it on the shelf of a local secondhand bookstore. Never one to ignore a fortuitous coincidence, I bought it immediately… and, as always, left it far too long unread.
Miranda Hart is a very funny comedian whose plummy accent contrasts delightfully with her slightly sophomoric silliness, but who can also bring some quality observational satire to her sets — and, of course, which she brought to her popular eponymous sitcom. 
About a quarter of the way into this book, I knew exactly where it was going. Our heroine has amnesia, and there is much mystery as to where she came from, who she is, why she was running away and who is the little boy she had with her, but who does not seem to be hers? When I tell you that she does not regain her memory until the novel’s overblown conclusion, hundreds of pages later, and that in the meantime she is proposed to multiple times by no less than three men, becomes engaged (halfway through the book!), is told that she is already married, survives multiple attempts on her life, and relies on the kindness of so many strangers she should be dead many times over even without the assassin on her trail, you will scarce credit it, nor should you.
“Introducing Marvel’s all-new, never-before-seen heroes of the 1930s!” So begins the blurb of this comic, and is the reason that I bought it. I didn’t quite understand how there were these long-lost characters from the 30s that had gone unseen for so many decades, especially since Marvel Comics was not even founded until 1939, which proved to me, yet again, that I am not nearly as smart as I sometimes think I am.
As someone who has worked with children a lot over the years, there was a good deal in 2002’s The Nanny Diaries that really resonated with me. I mention no names, as that would be unprofessional and unseemly, but I’ll not deny that there was a lot that was familiar about Nan’s interactions with assorted disinterested yet jealous parents and their somewhat spoilt but very lonely offspring. 
Thirteen short stories, most of them tied into existing Urban Fantasy series, loosely tied together with the (often even looser-ly applied) topic of education make up this often entertaining, sometimes tiresome, collection.
For all my love of science fiction, I have never been particularly drawn to cyberpunk as a subgenre. Of course, I have read Neuromancer and Johnny Mnemonic, Snowcrash and Altered Carbon among other such, not to mention a bunch of applicable Philip K. Dick. I’ve seen every iteration of Blade Runner that exists on film (and that is a lot). But I think there is something about its generally bleak vision of the future — that technology and progress will overtake us so implacably that we will be powerless to prevent society’s inevitable descent into cybernetics, dehumanization and, above all, loneliness — that makes me unutterably sad.