READING THE TBR, DAY 211: Bookworm (2018) by Lucy Mangan

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!