Lucy Mangan is a very witty writer and the book just carries you along, as annecdote follows annecdote from her reading life, often including her Father (a reader & thinker), her Mother (a doer and talker) and her younger sister (child lego fanatic and computer nerd). Here's a sample:
A few years ago I mentioned to my sister that I was planning
to visit Penhurst Place in Kent for the first time. ‘Oh yes’, she said. ‘Dad
and I went there once when I was little’.
‘Without me?’ I said, ever alert to potential acts of favouritism
and not about to let an intervening three decades dampen my outrage.
‘Yes, of course’, she said, looking baffled. ‘We used to go
every weekend.'
‘Penhurst Place?’ I said, equally baffled in my turn.
My sister is not known for love of either Philip Sidney , Renaissance
poetry or Elizabethan architecture. She likes computers, dogs and Mythbusters on
Discovery Channel.
‘No, turd,’ she said - she has never shown me the full
measure respect I feel is due to elder sisters – ‘different places on the Magan
Magical Mystery tour’.
It transpired that she and Dad used to set off in the car
every Saturday and take it in turns to choose whether to go left or right at
each junction and see where they ended up.
‘And where was I?’ I asked.
‘Where do you think you were?’ She said. ‘You were at home.
Reading. We told you we were going every time and you never broke eye contact
with your stupid books. Sometimes you'd wave goodbye as you turned a page.’
During the course of this highly entertaining memoir Lucy Mangan ranges over 250 books from nursery pre-reading days when her Dad would buy books and read them to her, through to her own voracious reading of primary and secondary school. There is a cornucopia of information about the books, their authors and illustrators, so Bookworm is also a potted history of writing for children from earliest days to the near present. She tells how different books affected her and of her likes and dislikes.
She says "I had a strict and enduring rule against books in which animals - especially talking animals - were a predominant feature" and then goes on to say how this caused her to miss out on Peter Rabbit, The Wind in The Willows, Tarka The Otter and other animal-centric stories. Eventually she realises this is simply a mindless predjudice and comments, "What. An. Idiot."
She is obviously a bookworm at the top end of the scale, bordering on insanity and seems to have copies of almost all the books she has ever read with over 10,000 in her house. Though when a book dealer came to view them she says, "He came. He saw. He left." There were no pristine collectors' items but simply well-worn readers' copies. She had, he said, what looked like a jumble sale hoisted on the walls.
As an adult reader she still needs her daily reading "fix" but now does not get absorbed as easily or as fully. Daily life and her critical faculties are more in play and it needs a powerful page to be able to banish them from her mind. Something that all life-long bookworms can relate to - I certainly do.
My early reading was the 50's and 60's so there is little overlap for me in the books, no Biggles, no Jennings, and no cowboy books and I've no idea of the teenage joy to be had from Sweet Valley High or Judy Blume, but this is essentially a book about the joy of childhood reading and this bookworm enjoyed every page.
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