I am the wrong nationality to appreciate Lucy Mangan’s Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading. She’s younger than I am, but her childhood reading in the ’80s is certainly different than mine in the ’60s. I preferred her Bookish, her memoir of adult reading. The titles she read as a child are very British-centered, which makes sense. She was dependent on her father and school and public libraries for her books, which were purchased in England. I hadn’t heard of most of them. Of course, there are classics such as Charlotte’s Web, the Narnia series, Tom Sawyer, Alice in Wonderland. I read all of those, but I was dependent on an American public library and a Catholic school library. That second one led to a number of books about saints and their deaths, sometimes in graphic details. But, how can I trust an author who didn’t like The Hobbit? Mangan may have wanted to be some of the girls who lived in the country in her beloved books, girls who didn’t have adventures. I wanted to be Bilbo Baggins and go on adventures. And, one of my favorite books as a child was Snow Treasure by Marie McSwigan, the adventures of a few Norwegian children. (More on that on April 3 when we discuss childhood favorites.) I enjoyed books about children and adventures, while Mangan was even more of bookworm than I was, and she didn’t want to read about adventures. In fact, Mangan said she enjoyed a character who was a stuffy girl, as she was. Mangan comes across as prim and proper. I was, too, but I longed for adventure.
I may have disagreed with some of Mangan’s favorite books and her opinions, but I understand the child she was. She said, “I was bookish, inert, unsociable.” Me, too. I totally understand her when she talks about childhood reading, and sinking into a book. “The intensity of childhood reading, the instant and complete absorption in a book – a good book, a bad book, in any kind of book – is something I would give much to recapture.” I know that feeling, of sinking into a book, and never hearing my mother talk to me. In fact, when we traveled, my father said I missed half the country because I had my nose in a book. As an adult, I went into raptures when I talked to my mother, raving about the beauty of Sedona, Arizona. My mother said, you were there. You never looked up from your book when we drove there. Oh, well, those childhood readers.
Mangan’s book is a memoir of the books she read as a child, and the feelings they evoked then and now. Those books take her back to her past. We all have those books, and I’m looking forward to our own chats about childhood books. Lucy Mangan and I may not have experienced the same stories, but Bookworm, with its examination of books and reading, forced me to organize my own thoughts as I looked at the books that shaped my reading life.
Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading by Lucy Mangan. Vintage, 2018. 322p.
FTC Full Disclosure – I bought a copy of the book.
