Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives
by Lucy Mangan
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A love letter to all those who come alive when they pull a new treasure off the shelf, stay up late reading just one more page and pack their suitcases with clothes wedged between books instead of the other way around. From exploring the stacks as a student, to finding her feet as a bookseller-turned-journalist, falling for a fellow bookworm in an independent bookshop, escaping the doldrums of new motherhood and finally building a (book) room of her own, Bookish is the story of a life spent show more falling in love with reading. Bookworm author Lucy Mangan chronicles her years of buying, borrowing and hoarding everything from well-worn literary classics to steamy bonkbusters, gripping thrillers, young adult novels and other not-so-guilty pleasures. Brimming with literary insights, wry observations and stellar recommendations, this book is an ode to the bookish places - from local libraries to bookstores big and small - and the stories that make us who we are. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
Lucy Mangan, it's fair to say, is a book lover. Her earlier book, Bookworm, tells the story of her bookish childhood, and this one, 'Bookish: How Reading Shapes our Lives', takes up where that one left off, as the teenage (but equally bookish) Lucy is moving on to adult books. And as we follow her progress to the current day we encounter all sorts of books that are important at different times, from studying 'Gawain and the Green Knight' in Middle English at Cambridge to Lee Child's Jack Reacher books which got her through the toddlerhood of her young son.
But rather than talking about a love of individual books, what this book is so good at is talking about a love of reading and books in general, in a way that really spoke to me. Here show more she is on re-reading:
I read Bookworm, a few years ago and enjoyed it but didn't love it, perhaps because the favourite books of the young Lucy weren't my favourites (I was definitely a fantasy loving child, and she definitely wasn't). But I loved this one. We still aren't necessarily reading the same books, but that doesn't really matter. Very strongly recommended. show less
But rather than talking about a love of individual books, what this book is so good at is talking about a love of reading and books in general, in a way that really spoke to me. Here show more she is on re-reading:
'I was an obsessive re-reader. I would be still, if I had the time and remained unaware of my limited span on this Earth and the number of absolutely irresistible books coming out each year. All reading is comfort reading, but oh God, the absolute joy and security that comes with sinking back into a book that you already know virtually by heart. You can lean into the twists and turns, appreciating them anew, but knowing nothing's going to surprise you this time. You can linger over the best parts, skim over others – effectively performing a bespoke edit that is your right as a reader; enjoy the words, the make-up, the structure; get to know the characters so well that you can take a moment here and there to stare off into the distance and imagine further scenes for them, knowing exactly how they'd react; eagerly anticipate your favourite moments and sigh with satisfaction once they're past; and ... oh, just enjoy the whole thing, every bit of it, all over again.'
I read Bookworm, a few years ago and enjoyed it but didn't love it, perhaps because the favourite books of the young Lucy weren't my favourites (I was definitely a fantasy loving child, and she definitely wasn't). But I loved this one. We still aren't necessarily reading the same books, but that doesn't really matter. Very strongly recommended. show less
A little bit of a dumb subtitle, I feel, as it makes the book sound dreadfully dry, which it is anything but. This is a memoir of Mangan's reading life from secondary school through the present (middle age and motherhood), and it's wonderful. She has a strong voice and a quirky sense of humor which I vibed with, and the books she talks about are just the right combination of things I've also read and things I haven't but that sound good. Recommended strongly if you like this kind of thing.
Finally, a book about books and reading that doesn’t sneer at genre fiction in favour of the DWG (dead white guy) canon, despite the author’s degree in Literature from Cambridge. Lucy Mangan may admire Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, Spenser Edmunds and the like, but she’s also fond of Lee Child, Marian Keyes, Emily Henry and Riley Sager, and not afraid to admit it.
Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives is a follow up to Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading, in which Mangan shares her love of books as a child. Here Lucy discusses her relationship with reading from late adolescence through to midlife adulthood.
The narrative is generally lighthearted though the author touches on some serious subjects such as stress, grief, and the show more pandemic. Mangan is an engaging writer who shares her thoughts and experiences articulately with enthusiasm and sincerity.
Mangan and I are of a similar age so many of the books she references are familiar, and we have enjoyed several of the same titles. We also share some milestones - university, marriage, motherhood, lockdown, so I could relate to how these events affected her reading habits. I too have a swathe of books that fall into “the category of Things I Feel I Might Like and Will Get to In the Fullness of Time, But Certainly Not Within What Normal People Would Call a Reasonable Period.” Regrettably I don’t have a dedicated library in my back garden, and my collection of physical books is slightly more modest, but maybe one day.
I enjoyed Bookish, it’s written for readers by a reader who, like me, reads, “Not to impress others, not under a completist compulsion, not to please someone or to try and make myself amenable to them…” but because, “A love of books is something ineradicable…” that brings comfort and joy. show less
Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives is a follow up to Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading, in which Mangan shares her love of books as a child. Here Lucy discusses her relationship with reading from late adolescence through to midlife adulthood.
The narrative is generally lighthearted though the author touches on some serious subjects such as stress, grief, and the show more pandemic. Mangan is an engaging writer who shares her thoughts and experiences articulately with enthusiasm and sincerity.
Mangan and I are of a similar age so many of the books she references are familiar, and we have enjoyed several of the same titles. We also share some milestones - university, marriage, motherhood, lockdown, so I could relate to how these events affected her reading habits. I too have a swathe of books that fall into “the category of Things I Feel I Might Like and Will Get to In the Fullness of Time, But Certainly Not Within What Normal People Would Call a Reasonable Period.” Regrettably I don’t have a dedicated library in my back garden, and my collection of physical books is slightly more modest, but maybe one day.
I enjoyed Bookish, it’s written for readers by a reader who, like me, reads, “Not to impress others, not under a completist compulsion, not to please someone or to try and make myself amenable to them…” but because, “A love of books is something ineradicable…” that brings comfort and joy. show less
I really loved Lucy Mangan's first account of her life as an obsessive reader, Bookworm: A Childhood Memoir (2018), which included many of the descriptions of 50 of her favourite childhood books that originally appeared in her Guardian newspaper column. This second volume takes up where Bookworm left off, but it covers a much longer period, more than 30 years from Mangan's teens, including secondary school and university studying English literature and her adult life to middle age.
The subtitle "how reading shapes our lives" seems a bit odd for a book based on one person's reading experiences and opinions. She is only a few years younger than me and my love of Bookworm was partly about our shared memories of some quite specific show more children's books.
We both enjoyed Jane Austen and preferred Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall to her better known sisters' novels. I enjoyed Shakespeare and poetry more than she did, and did a less traditional course so missed, or skipped, a lot of the canonical works, though I loved her story of arguing with a tutor about Lolita. And I am quite envious of her being able to buy a house with space for her own library room at the end of the garden (though I wouldn't move to Norfolk even for this).
I didn't love this quite as much as Bookworm, but it is readable and entertaining, and I want my own copy so I can reread bits of this, to agree and disagree with the author. show less
The subtitle "how reading shapes our lives" seems a bit odd for a book based on one person's reading experiences and opinions. She is only a few years younger than me and my love of Bookworm was partly about our shared memories of some quite specific show more children's books.
We both enjoyed Jane Austen and preferred Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall to her better known sisters' novels. I enjoyed Shakespeare and poetry more than she did, and did a less traditional course so missed, or skipped, a lot of the canonical works, though I loved her story of arguing with a tutor about Lolita. And I am quite envious of her being able to buy a house with space for her own library room at the end of the garden (though I wouldn't move to Norfolk even for this).
I didn't love this quite as much as Bookworm, but it is readable and entertaining, and I want my own copy so I can reread bits of this, to agree and disagree with the author. show less
Well I doubt there are many LTers who won't enjoy this book, read in two long sittings.
Writing about favourite reads from late teenhood to middle age, and about the experience of reading itself, it's like a warm hug. We share many favourites, and I pulled Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which has long languished unread, from my selves to give it a go.
I amused myself at thinking that the chapter on 'bonkbusters' would have nothing for me, only to find in my late teens and twenties I had read a number of them (though thrown aside a number - looking at you Collins sisters, but not judging - after five pages of Jackie's The Stud I passed it on to my 'Nan', who could make a navey blush, who loved it and so I was sorted for her show more Christmas presents going forward.
Jacqueline Susann's The Valley of the Dolls provides an oft remembered sibling tale. My sister and I shared a small bedroom divided by my bookcase. She is 7 years younger than I. The family were on a train to the beach one day, she was about eight, and we shared the carriage with a couple of other people. My mother noticed the man sitting opposite my sister had a slight smirk on his faced, so she looked at my sister, who was deep into my copy of The Valley of the Dolls, so my mother said 'She probably thought it was about dolls' to the carriage at large, and my disgruntled sister said firmly 'I did not, I read the back and thought it would be interesting', she is yet to live the story down.
Lucy and I differ however on our bookish needs when grieving, she turns to the new, and I bury myself in my favourite reads, not simply because they offer no surprises, because that isn't so, but because of their tone, and the friends they offer.
I've got, but yet to read her Bookworm: A Childhood Memoir, as yet unread because there are only a handful of childhood books I have revisited as an adult, but I'll be rummaging in the tbr mountain to nudge it up.
And if you are curious about her lovely library, here it is. I can only dream. I may have not quite, but nearly as many books, but they live in chaos.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/nov/06/lucy-mangan-creating-my-lib.... show less
Writing about favourite reads from late teenhood to middle age, and about the experience of reading itself, it's like a warm hug. We share many favourites, and I pulled Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which has long languished unread, from my selves to give it a go.
I amused myself at thinking that the chapter on 'bonkbusters' would have nothing for me, only to find in my late teens and twenties I had read a number of them (though thrown aside a number - looking at you Collins sisters, but not judging - after five pages of Jackie's The Stud I passed it on to my 'Nan', who could make a navey blush, who loved it and so I was sorted for her show more Christmas presents going forward.
Jacqueline Susann's The Valley of the Dolls provides an oft remembered sibling tale. My sister and I shared a small bedroom divided by my bookcase. She is 7 years younger than I. The family were on a train to the beach one day, she was about eight, and we shared the carriage with a couple of other people. My mother noticed the man sitting opposite my sister had a slight smirk on his faced, so she looked at my sister, who was deep into my copy of The Valley of the Dolls, so my mother said 'She probably thought it was about dolls' to the carriage at large, and my disgruntled sister said firmly 'I did not, I read the back and thought it would be interesting', she is yet to live the story down.
Lucy and I differ however on our bookish needs when grieving, she turns to the new, and I bury myself in my favourite reads, not simply because they offer no surprises, because that isn't so, but because of their tone, and the friends they offer.
I've got, but yet to read her Bookworm: A Childhood Memoir, as yet unread because there are only a handful of childhood books I have revisited as an adult, but I'll be rummaging in the tbr mountain to nudge it up.
And if you are curious about her lovely library, here it is. I can only dream. I may have not quite, but nearly as many books, but they live in chaos.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/nov/06/lucy-mangan-creating-my-lib.... show less
This is a field of spring flowers for all of us who love books and reading.
Simon, of Stuck in a Book blog, brought this book to my attention, and his conclusion is my conclusion - her reading tastes don't usually agree with mine, but talking about books with her over a cup of coffee would be a blast.
She usually talks about her life when she talks about her reading and her favorite books - sometimes in real-time, sometimes reminiscing, including the year of covid and her father's death, the latter of which brought me to tears.
She would read to her ailing father and also set him up with audio books, but he most enjoyed listening to Lucy and her mother talking. "He would just lie and gaze happily at Mum. She had been, after all - for 50 show more years and more - always his favorite story." Heartbreaking.
As a relief valve, she also at this time is setting up her library in her new house, and listening to her love of physical books and the stories they hold make all readers swoon.
She also offers words of advice, thought she doesn't phrase them as that. Like: If you feel guilty about buying a new book at full price, just pro rate the cost over the years you will have it, like you would a TV or a car. However, also buy books at used-books shops and borrow books from your library because both feel to be on the brink of extinction.
My only quibble was fighting through her all-too-frequent long and tangled sentences. They could go on for 10 lines and include just about every punctuation mark. Such as this, when she was 36 and pregnant and didn't read one book on childbirth or parenting: I felt I had, over my previous 36 years (that's the age at which you are considered an "elderly prima gravida," by the way - "old for a first pregnancy"; I translated it much more loosely as "coming into the prime of my gravitas," which made it a lot more palatable), absorbed enough about the whole baby business by osmosis.
But I was willing to fight through these word jungles just because she can speak so lovingly about books and reading and can make both much more important than "just a hobby." show less
Simon, of Stuck in a Book blog, brought this book to my attention, and his conclusion is my conclusion - her reading tastes don't usually agree with mine, but talking about books with her over a cup of coffee would be a blast.
She usually talks about her life when she talks about her reading and her favorite books - sometimes in real-time, sometimes reminiscing, including the year of covid and her father's death, the latter of which brought me to tears.
She would read to her ailing father and also set him up with audio books, but he most enjoyed listening to Lucy and her mother talking. "He would just lie and gaze happily at Mum. She had been, after all - for 50 show more years and more - always his favorite story." Heartbreaking.
As a relief valve, she also at this time is setting up her library in her new house, and listening to her love of physical books and the stories they hold make all readers swoon.
She also offers words of advice, thought she doesn't phrase them as that. Like: If you feel guilty about buying a new book at full price, just pro rate the cost over the years you will have it, like you would a TV or a car. However, also buy books at used-books shops and borrow books from your library because both feel to be on the brink of extinction.
My only quibble was fighting through her all-too-frequent long and tangled sentences. They could go on for 10 lines and include just about every punctuation mark. Such as this, when she was 36 and pregnant and didn't read one book on childbirth or parenting: I felt I had, over my previous 36 years (that's the age at which you are considered an "elderly prima gravida," by the way - "old for a first pregnancy"; I translated it much more loosely as "coming into the prime of my gravitas," which made it a lot more palatable), absorbed enough about the whole baby business by osmosis.
But I was willing to fight through these word jungles just because she can speak so lovingly about books and reading and can make both much more important than "just a hobby." show less
A book about books for people who love books. The author is a book lover , and details her life from student, to bookseller and eventually a journalist, as well as a mother and a wife. Most of us will be able to recognize ourselves , as book buyers , hoarders, loving reading and our favourite titles. I picked up several new titles to explore as I read the book.
Recommended.
Recommended.
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