BOOKWORM: A MEMOIR OF CHILDHOOD READING.

ISBN 978-1784709228

BOOKWORM: A MEMOIR OF CHILDHOOD READING by LUCY MANGAN.

When Lucy Mangan was little, stories were everything.

They opened up different worlds and cast new light on this one.

She was whisked away to Narnia – and Kirrin Island – and Wonderland. She ventured down rabbit holes and womble burrows into midnight gardens and chocolate factories.

Now, in Bookworm, Lucy brings these worlds and the

favourite characters of our collective childhoods back to life, uncovering a few forgotten treasures along the way, and, poignantly, wittily using them to tell her own story, that of a born, and unrepentant, bookworm.

- Back Cover Blurb

I still have all my childhood books.

- First Sentence, Introduction

... enough fans like the eight-year-old boy who wrote to him soon after the book's publication to ask how much it cost to travel to the wild things. 'Because if it's not too expensive, my sister and I would like to go there for the summer.'

Sendak's favourite fan, though, was a little boy who sent him a card with a little drawing on it. Out of respect for a fellow artist, Sendak went to some trouble with his reply and included a little drawing of his own - of a wild thing - to the boy. He got a letter back from the boy's mother which said ' Jim loved your card so much he ate it.' Sendak considered it the highest compliment he had ever been paid.

- Memorable Moment, Page 39

MY THOUGHTS ... A book about books written by, but of course, a bookworm. Surely the stuff of every book lover's dreams and yet ...

That the portions of the book that spoke of the books I loved as a girl, that I was taken right back to my childhood were nothing short of enchanting. 

That the author was, like myself, the kind of child who haunted the library, spending her pocket money on books someone I readily identified with - so much so that I vividly recalled buying my very first book, The Pebbles Go To Town  by Michael Cooper and how grown up I felt to have reached such an age that, bliss, I actually got to have my very own library card. 

That Mangan's recollections were told with a certain charm, warmth and often self-deprecating humour left me feeling warm all over as did her descriptions of time spent reading with her parents (in particular her father from whom she seems to have largely inherited her love of books) and grandmother.

That she adored many of the books I did and yet didn't others, something that really didn't matter. What did matter being she unashamedly stood by her choices; choices that I have to say I didn't always agree with - I mean what kind of persons liking of fairy tales begins and ends with the Ladybird Classic editions?

I did like this book but not as much as I thought I would.

Left feeling a tad disappointed. I had expected to be left gushing about this book ... and for, what, maybe the first quarter of it or so I was and then ...

And then came a subtle move towards what I felt to be an (not quite but almost) academic inspection at which point the book became less a memoir about the author's love of books and more a book about children's literature in general. It was then, the book in danger of becoming a list of books with a running commentary, that, for me at least, Bookworm: A Memoir Of Childhood Reading lost something of its sheer unadulterated joyfulness. 

SUMMED UP IN A SENTENCE ...  A book about books written by a lover of books that eloquently celebrates the love of reading.