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 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.

I predict that this book will be a bestseller because people who read, like reading about reading. And most of them were avid child readers, so will be in tune with Mangan’s account of her childhood reading. Lucy Mangan is probably best known as a Guardian columnist and TV reviewer. Here she sends herself up as a nerdy, precocious bookworm who preferred reading to life; life being, according to other people, socialising and getting out in the fresh air occasionally. We follow her through reading picture books (Judith Kerr, Shirley Hughes), with her father to discovering Judy Blume in her teens; on the way falling for Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl and classics like Little Women, The Secret Garden, Tom’s Midnight Garden and the Just William books. Far too many books to mention, although they all cry out for it.

The forty-something generation will find much to sympathise with here and will probably utter glad cries of recognition as each fictional treasure is revealed and squealed over. People my age will think, poor Lucy, she was born too late (she may agree with this). She seems to have gone to terrible schools full of silly girls, only one of whom became a reading friend. She was never able to get into historical fiction because she didn’t know any history. She wouldn’t read any books with animals in and so missed out on, for example, The Wind in the Willows. I’m pleased to report that she now regrets this.

Where she’s so good is on the importance of reading, of entering another world and above all, rereading favourites over and over again. I personally find her style juvenile for someone her age; far too much ‘ya wanna’ and ‘yer’ and her determination to be funny all the time can be irritating. It’s a tribute to her enthusiasm that I obtained copies of and read two of her favourite books: Keep - Out Private by Gwen Grant and Sybil Burr’s Life with Lisa. They didn’t have me falling about laughing but they are good and I agree that they shouldn’t be out of print. I also *had* to reread immediately some of my own old favourites (Tom’s Midnight Garden and Eve Garnett’s One End Street books). Whether or not you agree with all the author’s opinions, you certainly won’t find the book dull.

I read this thanks to the publishers and NetGalley. It’s out on 1st March: order now!

As a self-proclaimed bookworm I love nothing more than hearing about other bookworm's reading experiences. Lucy Mangan's memoir is exactly the sort of nostalgia trip I hoped it would be. It was a little self-indulgent in places but if you can't be self-indulgent in a memoir, when can you be?

Her descriptions of the books she read as a child are wonderful and the historical background she gives to the publication of each book was fascinating for the most part (although I'll admit to skimming one or two books which I myself never read).

What I loved most about this book was the passion for reading that jumped off the page. I've never before read something which so accurately sums up why I love reading, what I feel when I read and how it feels like every book I read as a child became part of my soul. It was an absolute joy to travel through Lucy's childhood with her and discover that it wasn't just me ploughing my way through childhood devouring book after book.

As I've grown up I've realised that true bookworms are few and far between. The same people that tell me they love reading balk at the idea I read 100 books a year. Lucy, I feel, would be my ideal friend. The type of friend you could meet up with for coffee but spend most of your time reading in companionable silence, only coming up for air to share a particularly good passage.

If you're anything like me you'll read "Bookworm" and will want to keep notes so you don't forget all the books you want to look up after you've finished reading. Luckily, a very handy list of all the books discussed is included should you forget which ones you had intended to seek out. Personally there are a few on the list I can't wait to check out for the first time, many I read as a child and would love to revisit as an adult and more still I look forward to sharing with my daughter in the years to come.

As a life-long bookworm, I could not wait to get my hands on Mangan's book about her childhood reading. I'm always keen to read about the experiences of one of my own tribe of book obsessives and was anticipating a blast from the past of my own childhood reading.

I was absolutely not disappointed. Being a similar age to Mangan, a lot of her book choices are cosily familiar and she writes with humour and passion. It was lovely to hear her take on old favourites, such as The Borrowers and Goodnight Mister Tom, as well as many books that I loved as a child and have recently shared with my own children. It was also wonderful to hear echoes of my own adult reservations about some of the books I loved as a child - growing up really does put some of them in a new and unflattering light! I was also reminded of some books I haven't thought about for about 20 years...for example, Love and Betrayal and Hold the Mayo (anyone?!) Of course not all of Mangan's choices were familiar, but it's so well written that it feels like a friend recommending you great new reads.

What I really loved was Mangan's defence of being a bookworm as it is something a lot of people don't understand. Bits of this made me laugh out loud as it was all so familiar.

I'd strongly recommend this to any keen readers who want a humorous, nostalgic trip through the bookcases of their childhood. I suspect it will particularly strike a chord with (probably female) bookworms of a similar age to Mangan (I think 43) who will have a great time rediscovering their love of Sweet Valley High, Judy Blume and other classics!

There is a lot of autobiography in this round-up of a life's reading of juvenile fiction, from The Very Hungry Caterpillar up to whatever school mates had inked out as fruity bits in adult novels. Conversely, there is a lot of appreciation for the hobby/lifestyle/necessity of reading in this summary of a woman's upbringing with contrasting parents, and not much patience for the idea of real-life friends. It's all fine and well, but the style is really going to be Marmite - it really does just seem to flump unedited on to the page (witness her constant use of extended sections in brackets that make you lose your thread by the time they ended - see what I did there?!), and the sense of humour is extremely forced, forceful and flawed throughout. Apart from that, of course, it's right up my street, even when being of a different gender I was reading very much a different selection of books at the same time.