Bookworm: A memoir of childhood reading by Lucy Mangan was a must read for me as soon as I read the description. Why would a bookworm not want to read a book about books and being a bookworm?

Lucy Mangan begins the book by telling the author she still has all her childhood books and that she loves them all because they made me who I am.

She talks about her sister saying that was a friendless child but she counters who needed flesh-and-blood friends when I had Jo March, Charlotte, Wilbur and everyone at Mallory Towers at my beck and call?

I loved the mention of Mallory Towers because it brought back to me my own love of that series and a memory of upsetting my mum by asking her why I couldn’t go and live in a boarding school like the characters in the book.

Lucy Mangan explains, I read because I loved it. I read wherever I could, whenever I could, for as long as I could.

She talks about her lack of interest in baby bouncers and the like and her explanation is one of my favourite quotes from the book:

“I think the explanation lies in the fact that I wasn’t really a baby. I was a bookworm, life doesn’t really begin until you get hold of your first book, until then – well, you’re just waiting really.”

Bookworm: A memoir of childhood reading added to my own list of books I want to read as well as reminding me of some of the classics I enjoyed reading as a child. I have vague memories of reading both The Hungry Caterpillar and Spot The Dog. Like Lucy books by Enid Blyton formed a large part of my childhood reading, although other than the Mallory Towers books I preferred the like of The Tower in Ho-Ho Wood.

One of the other things I found I shared with Lucy was that as a child one of the things I loved the most about reading was the joy of discovering new words and their meaning.

Her description of trying to narrow down her choice of library book was familiar to me as well, not just in a library but anytime I had to choose a book to take home with me. Many times, my dad would give in out of frustration and let me make an extra choice just so we could go home.

My favourite quote from the Bookworm: a memoir of childhood reading describes a process that often happens to me still whenever I read and probably frustrates those around me as it frustrated Lucy’s mother.

“I never deliberately ignored her calls to come to lunch or dinner or to start cleaning my teeth and get ready for bed. Like every bookworm before and since, I simply and genuinely didn’t hear them.”

This book is a must read for any bookworm and for anyone wanting to build a library for their own child but aren’t sure where to start.

As a life-long reader and someone who turns to books in times of crisis, illness and as relaxation, Bookworm was a totally indulgent read from start to finish. Mangan's love of books and of reading pours from every page and when she gets to talking about Milly Molly Mandy my heart leapt with joy. Like the author, the Milly Molly Mandy books hold the most special place in my heart and have been returned to again and again over the course of my life. It was such a treat to feel this shared joy with a writer whose columns and other work I've always enjoyed. This book is the perfect present for anyone who enjoys reading, or for someone who might have forgotten how to enjoy it and wants to reignite the spark. I'm already wondering when I can read it again.

I have never read anything by Lucy Mangan before, but, having adored this delightful memoir of childhood reading, I will certainly be exploring her previous books. Like the author of this book, I was a bookish child and have remained a bookish adult. Like the author, I always preferred my childish adventures to be vicarious – I would rather read about the Famous Five out camping than suffer the discomforts, and dangers, myself. Like her, I became immersed in books, to the infuriation of those around me (my husband still sometimes grumbles at my lack of response to his remarks, but generally accepts my inability to know he is there as a plus that enables him to watch endless snooker championships – each to their own).

This is a memoir of Lucy Mangan’s childhood reading, but it is so much more than that. It gives potted backgrounds to authors and books, it gives context, and it enthuses. From Mog, “The Very Hungry Caterpillar,” and Maurice Sendak, through her love of the library, the difficulty of fitting in at school, “My Naughty Little Sister,” “Milly-Molly-Mandy,” Ladybird Books, E.Nesbit, Roald Dahl, Enid Blyton, illustrations, Narnia, school books, Classics, Just William, the Wombles , Judy Blume and on and on and on, through endless literary delights, there is much to re-discover – or, if you are lucky – to discover for the first time. Along the way, the author muses on growing up and how books help you do so, on how those of us who grew up before the internet had to go on quests to discover whether favourite books had sequels and, if they did, were they still in print?

Lucy Mangan is younger than me by about a decade, so not all of her childhood books were mine (I missed “Sweet Valley High,” but remember my niece’s love of them) and have since ordered other books she raved about (“Private – Keep out!”) to share with my own daughter. There is a helpful list of books at the end, have you not (as most Bookworms do) activity scribble notes, afraid of missing a title. As an adult, Mangan ruefully remarks, we read differently. It is true – I help run several book groups and I utilise Audible to help me read while shuttling between school run and work – but the true joy of any Bookworm is reading and that is, generally, a solitary occupation. It is joyful to know you are not alone in your obsession and, should you also love reading, you will also love this book. It was a pleasure to read and my thanks go to the publisher, via NetGalley, for a review copy of this book.

What a treat! I whizzed through this part memoirs part history marvel in a few hours, because it was everything I could remember about my own childhood love of books.

Amongst many others the author discusses her discovery of such gems as: The Family from One End Street, The Famous Five, The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark, The Borrowers, Little Women, What Katy Did, Judy Blume and The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. If you remember reading any of these for the first time, or just identify as a bookworm in general this book is such a delight.

Every chapter delivers a gift to unwrap; the first time each book is found and its secrets divulged. Alongside Mangan's own memories of the books there is carefully researched facts and anecdotes about the authors' lives, backgrounds and the origins of the stories. It also features the very important work of illustrators, who really are arguably the first to capture a child with an imaginative cover and bring the story to life beyond words.

Lucy Mangan's style of writing is moreish, relatable and entertaining and it made every chapter flow effortlessly. I particularly loved the sibling banter featured from her sister, and the heartfelt fondness expressed for her father, the ultimate giver of books!

This beautiful book has a way of making you think about your own journey in books (mine is detailed below), forgotten treasures, and for me, my own family's love of reading that has passed down many generations. I am lucky enough that two of my grandparents are alive, both avid readers, and my Grandpa especially (who is 91) loves to discuss newly discovered authors with his grandchildren, and listen to his great-grandchildren read and rave about books. I'm incredibly lucky to have this, that my children and niece have this, and I can only hope I may leave a similar legacy of bookworm passion to children I spend time with through the years.

Fittingly, this book also covers the role of children's books in both perpetuating and challenging prejudices over time; censorship, diversity, misogyny, how environmental, political and religious messages have been shoehorned in to stories etc. This is touched on succinctly and not in a coercive manner but as it is a recurrent theme for contention I feel it was discussed at important points, opening up important dialogues that continue in the world of literature.

I am sure it is no coincidence that this book is released on 1st March 2018 which is World Book Day, and I can't think of a better tribute to the power of reading and a childhood involving books than this. It is definitely an ideal gift for any bookworm you know, one I think will inspire many to revisit some of the classic tales featured, and with such a beautiful cover it will be an asset to your bookshelf.

This book is a joy to read - part way through I began to wonder if Lucy Mangan was related to me, the way she talks about books, and describes the pure joy that reading gives her. As I am older than Lucy, I read a lot of the books on her list as an adult - the Twlight series and Sweet Valley High are examples, but others I read at the right age - Thimble Summer, the Chalet School series and Antonia Forrest's Marlowe books.

Librarians will love this book, but I would recommend it to English teachers as well, and parents who are trying to find ideas for books for their children to read.

I found this book very difficult to get into. Too many asides and comments in brackets to make it readable. I had the impression that this was a narrative written for the authors own pleasure, rather than one which we could comfortably gain from ourselves as readers.

Wow. Just Wow.
I thought I was a book worm but compared to Mangan I am a mere book maggot in comparison.
I got so much enjoyment from reading this essay and as described "love-letter" to Mangan's childhood books and the act of reading them. Almost all the of books she read growing up were exactly the same as me and I remembered the feeling of discovering those exact same lands, places and people and being so immersed that the world I was reading about become as real as this world. She covers short sections of her childhood reading life e.g picture books, just starting to read, school and tells us about the books that have affected her the most. Since she was reading for most of the time.
It's true and something that hadn't occurred to me until I read this book , but the childhood reading experience is a more intense and possibly life-altering one than reading as an adult. Not since I started taking my school work seriously and then there was jobs, money and everything else, have I really been able to feel as comforted, connected and immersed in a book.
Mangan is hilariously funny and while some of her views I don't entirely agree with, her sense of good fiction is second to none and I will make sure I look up some more of her wonderful writing.

This book, oh my goodness, where do I start? How do you do justice to a book which has reached inside your soul and taken tiny pieces of your psyche and stitched them into a rich, warm, joyful tapestry? If you were a remotely bookish child you will identify with this book, and if you were a bookish child between the late 70s and early 90s this is essentially your childhood distilled into 330 pages.

The best compliment I can give this book is it has made me want to do so much rereading! I think I shall dedicate my summer to it. The Railway Children! The Katy books! Judy Blume! THE LILY PICKLES BAND BOOK - I had forgotten this book even existed, but as soon as I read the title the cover immediately popped into my head! I'm going to be pressing this book on all of my bookish friends for the foreseeable future.

A lovely interesting read that made me remember a lot of my favourite reads growing up

Written BY one, FOR one. A history of children's books through the eyes and reading of one lover of the printed word.

Sister from another mother. Lucy Mangan's bookshelves form the soul of her book, as she talks through all her childhood reads, from picture books to her choices as a burgeoning adult, from Caterpillars to dystopias by way of Blyton and Blume. I would say that 80% of her book tastes match mine so it was a real pleasure to see someone else passionate about my own favourites.

Mangan makes this a personal history of her own years spent on the sofa (she wasn't allowed to read in private) glued to the pages in front of her as family life (and trips!) happened around her, with Lucy happily oblivious. Along the way, she seamlessly gives us a short history of children's literature down the centuries, fascinating if you've not any previous knowledge of how the genre became what it is today.

"Come bedtime, do you remember waiting four nanoseconds after the door closed before whipping out your torch and carrying on where parental stricture had required you leave off until tomorrow?" Yes! The number of batteries I went through... It is so true that you both get to know and make friends with someone simply by studying their shelves, and I think Mangan and I were destined to be BFFs (possibly the first time I have ever used that acronym) - Shirley Hughes? The Phantom Tollbooth? Forever?

For a book lover, it's the height of filial love to have someone else voice their likes and find they match with yours. Mangan systematically works through her pre-school reading and how she discovered books, through to her school days and the books bought for her, and then to adolescence when she still flirted with children's literature but began the challenging journey to adult books through her own unique route.

Wonderful. Heartening, supportive and will have readers feeling fully justified in their many hours and years spent hidden behind book spines (or screens!), eyes darting back and forth.

Please, if you're a reader, just get this one! You know how you are.

With thanks to Netgalley for the advance e-copy.

When I read the description of this as being a memoir of childhood reading, I knew I had to take a trip down memory lane! While I am not familiar with Mangan's previous writing as a columnist, I found her style to be largely enjoyable and it was interesting to read her views on various childhood classics.

It was lovely to engage with characters much-loved and those long-forgotten. I will be recommending this to fellow bookworms as an enjoyable way to reminisce over the many afternoons spent dug into a book! Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for allowing me to read this book in exchange for an honest review. #NetGalley #Bookworm

Lucy Mangan talks through her bookshelf. Not exactly gripping, mildly nostalgic but beware smug tone of person who thinks they are only one to have ever read a book.

I’m not particularly familiar with Mangan’s output as a journalist, but as an avowed bookworm myself, how I could pass up a book like this? And it does not disappoint. Mangan’s writing is inviting, making you feel like you’re sat at home, having a conversation with an old friend about your favourite books, and really, what could be better than that?! Working from the very first books she remembers, Mangan talks about the books that affected her, the people who introduced them to her, and what they taught her about the world. The range of books she discusses is wide and eclectic, showing how important it is that children be allowed and encouraged to read not just the classics, not just ‘good’ books, but the books that interest them and draw them in. I was always an avid reader and as a child, I was as likely to be reading Requiem for a Wren as I was to be reading Jill’s Gymkhana for the twentieth time.

I think my personal favourite section was the last, about the books Mangan read in her teenage years. There were a couple of major overlaps with my own teenage reading, notably Sweet Valley High and Judy Blume, which made me instantly, deeply nostalgic. Mangan talks about how, as we get older, books help us understand the world around us, and the crucial idea that other people’s experiences are different to ours and inform the way they react in situations. They can also help us work out the kind of people we are, as we read and think about which of these characters we might be more like, or which we might like to be friends with.

About two thirds of the way through the book is a chapter about The Phantom Tollbooth and Tom’s Midnight Garden (I’ve read neither, but have queued up Tom’s Midnight Garden from the library), in which Mangan talks about that desire to completely inhabit the worlds contained within our favourite books. She writes, ‘My distance from it…gave me a heightened sense of how impossible it is to absorb the books we love as fully as we want to’. I don’t think anyone has ever articulated quite so clearly the feelings you experience when you finish a book you’ve truly loved. There are only a few books I can think of that have made me feel this way – A Closed and Common Orbit (Becky Chambers) and The Secret Place (Tana French) come to mind – but they give you that experience of wanting to be able to climb inside the story and truly live it. You want to see what happened round that corner, or to that character after the last page, and knowing that you’ll never be able to is bittersweet.

I loved this book. It made me feel so understood and so welcome in the world. If, like me, you love books and love hearing other people’s thoughts about them (and I’m not one hundred percent sure why you’d be here if you didn’t!), Bookworm is definitely worth your time.

I love Lucy Mangan's writing (I read her column in the Stylist) - so was always interested in reading this, especially as it coincides with a love of children's books.
On which subject - I think we grew up in parallel, so many of her favourites or defining reads were mine too!
Very accessible, a really enjoyable read.

I have been a Lucy Mangan fan since she first started at the Guardian and wrote about hamster skin coats (look it up on'tinternet, it's great). I absolutely loved this book and I'll be buying copies for my book loving and librarian friends. I laughed out loud a number of times, got a bit teary about her poor Dad and looked up lots of the books she discussed. Absolutely lovely.

'I learned that quietness could be used to personify not only goodness but also intelligence and sensitivity, and so I silently earned a small reputation as a [child] of superior intellect, a little scholar,’ recalls one of the characters, ‘while in fact I was smug and lethargic and dull as a mud turtle.’ That’s me, I thought, and hoped it would be enough to get me into university. And it was.'

Hah! I laughed aloud and identified very closely with Mangan's memoir or being a lifetime, devoted bookworm.
Growing up as the class reader, not quite fitting in or understanding why everyone else didn't just want to stay in the book corner, or await the time for the end of day read from the teacher.
This was me and so many other children growing up; learning that escapism can come in the form of a book and the many adventures it can lead to.

I enjoyed reading Mangan's reviews of many books I am familiar with, both children's classics and some more obscure choices, I have also made a to read/to buy list from this memoir and cannot wait to delve into these suggestions.

This was a great walk down memory lane, written with passion and humour.

Bookworm A Memoir of Childhood Reading by Lucy Mangan

This was an entertaining read covering the growing up of a journalist related through the books that she loved as a child and as a teenager.

I didn’t read it in order myself at first, but dipped into the chapters I felt most drawn to. Then I went back and read it in order to get the necessary time line of her growing up. She is portrayed as a real bookworm who would rather read a book than do anything else and this will resonate with the reader who is likely to pick up this book.

She is also a great advocate for the importance of libraries

At all times Mangan is passionate about the books. She has wit and humour in large doses too

“…Streatfeild’s books may be starting to read like medieval runes. Kardashian Shoes would be a book with a very different message”

This also illustrates another feature of Mangan’s writing in that she balances nostalgia with awareness of current society and culture.


I wonder if other readers will be like me and just “skip”/ scan read the descriptions of books which they don’t know, to concentrate on their own favourites? Of course, half the fun is disagreeing with Mangan on occasion. I can’t agree with her dislike for fairy tales and Tolkien for example.


This is a “lighter” read than Francis Spufford’s “The Child That Books Built”. I wonder what different generations will make of it, as I am too old to remember certain books?

I liked Lucy’s Bookshelf at the back of the book but would have preferred the book to have an Index to locate my own particular favourites.

An enjoyable read for the Inner Child in all of us.

What an absolute joy! I love books about books, and this is one of the loveliest I've read. Lucy Mangan's voice is so pleasant to read – like chatting to a funny, self-deprecating, book-nerd friend. I had a long, boring day consisting of 8 hours of train travel (all of it delayed, of course), and this book was the only thing that got me through. I left with a huge list of childhood favourites to revisit, as well as some new-to-me titles to investigate. I usually want books to be shorter, but I wish this one had been three times the length.

“People say life is the thing, but I prefer reading.”

Lucy Mangan’s memoir begins with a quote which could be a manifesto for many self-confessed bookworms - myself included.

The book is a delight to read as Lucy, now the mother of a young child herself (always a great opportunity to rediscover beloved childhood favourites) takes us very entertainingly through her childhood reading memories, delving into the genesis and context of many. (And also the context of Lucy herself, with vignettes from her family life.) We’re roughly similar ages - I think I’m a few years older - and there’s huge overlap between our reading experiences.

Not so much the very early ones - I probably had picture books, but I don’t remember them, apart from one which had an illustration of a totem pole. (No idea.) The Very Hungry Caterpillar did not enter my world as an infant, though it did later as a young mother and again, still later, as a significantly older mother of a second child - likewise Mog, The Tiger Who Came to Tea, Spot, the Ahlbergs, lovely Teddy Robinson, Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy and many more.

Once I was reading by myself though I devoured everything I could get my hands on, mainly courtesy of the library, and many of the books I loved are included here.

From Enid Blyton (I know), through C S Lewis, Noel Streatfeild, pony books (Jill was my favourite), the Wombles, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Alice in Wonderland, Little 1Women, What Katy Did, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Anne of Green Gables, Just William, Antonia Forest’s marvellous novels about the Marlow family (I’m glad Lucy is also a fan), the endless delights of P G Wodehouse (still my favourite comfort reading), and so many more. Most of these bear a lot of rereading. Not Enid Blyton, but I did love her at the time.

There were others - not, actually, that many - which I hadn’t heard of or hadn’t read. I somehow never discovered Gwen Grant, but I’m definitely going to seek her out now. For some unaccountable reason I don’t recall ever reading The Phantom Tollbooth or The Railway Children, though I certainly knew of them (and read The Treasure Seekers and Five Children and It numerous times.) Perhaps they just weren’t in the library. And I didn’t read Goodnight Mister Tom until I was an adult, at which point it ripped my heart out.

Some of my memories which aren’t mentioned here are Beverley Nichols (who I was astounded to learn, many years later, was in fact a bloke!); Diana Wynne Jones, The Wind on the Moon; the Jennings series (I’m not sure what appealed to me so much about a series set in a boys’ prep school in the 1950s, but evidently something did); a short story collection by Joan Aiken called All But a Few which was both entrancing and vaguely unsettling; Harriet the Spy; Marianne Dreams; and so on and so on...

(I’m very jealous that Lucy still has most of her childhood books... I have none of mine, and have been forced to hunt down identical copies of particular favourites via the Internet where possible. I’m sure there are lots I have forgotten completely, though, and perhaps even more - mainly favourite library books- which I can vaguely remember but with insufficient detail to have a hope of identifying them.)

Lucy’s writing is of course a joy to read and there are so many great quotes here I could keep going all day. (“I was about to start school. This is not a good time for a misanthropic, introvert bookworm.”)

And the cover is of course beautiful.

Do I need to say again that I loved it?

I loved it.

Huge thanks for the opportunity to read and review.

The author has a remarkable memory for her childhood books,the writing didn't grab me which it has too in my opinion