Reading: Bookworm

[white_hart]

Lucy Mangan's Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading is a delightful tour through the first sixteen years or so of her literary life, and was particularly delightful for me because she and I are the same age and many of her childhood favourites were also mine. I particularly enjoyed the first couple of chapters, dwelling on the wonderful picture books of the 1970s - not only is Mangan possibly the only person outside my immediate family to have heard of Quentin Blake's Lester and the Unusual Pet, but she also saw the events of The Tiger Who Came To Tea as being at least as worrying as they would be exciting - and the section dealing with Antonia Forest's Marlows novels, which I knew that she was also a fan of. The other sections were more hit and miss in terms of being reminded of old favourites, with several of mine missing - she admits to not being a fantasy reader, other than Narnia, so there's no Susan Cooper, no Alan Garner, no Diana Wynne Jones; Laura Ingalls Wilder is mentioned in passing but not in detail, and Arthur Ransome is strangely completely absent - but I still recognised the experience of being an awkward, bookish child in an era before the internet existed to help me meet like-minded people (and to track down obscure and out-of-print sequels). It's a charming and funny book with some interesting and thought-provoking observations about the messages behind children's literature and what reading means to a bookworm. I gulped it down this time (and kept feeling like I was being transported back to my younger self), but will almost certainly re-read sections more slowly at some point too.