If you have ever used books as an escape or if you have ever put reading above other commitments, then you will find it easy to commune with this author who is writing about how reading shapes our lives.
This is a follow up book to ‘Bookworm.’ The idea is the same and it’s fun. The books that have touched you, haunted you, led you onto other authors, changed your way of thinking. It makes you feel very mellow and comfortable to realise that certain books have the same effect on others as on yourself. The whole Mantlemass series comes to mind. They are historical children’s books by Barbara Willard that I have read several times with great pleasure and hopefully will do so again. And, Lucy Mangan loves them too!
I don’t wish you to think this is only about children’s books. One chapter about her reading whilst studying at Cambridge, gave me some new insights into Jane Austen. ‘Free indirect style,’ a phrase of which I had never heard is explained thus: it means narrating something in the third person while keeping some elements, some of the perspective, of a first person narrator. This enables the writer to reveal more about a character, albeit very subtly. I’ve thought about this and feel I understand it. I can think of many examples in Sense and Sensibility. Interesting.
‘Bookish’ is perhaps slightly uneven as a read but I have to say I loved it. I learnt that I had a tsundoku habit, that is I may well be buying books at a rate that far outstrips the speed at which I can read them. I have many friends who read but most of them are, in my opinion, rather cavalier about the books themselves. They are happy, basically, to get rid of them. I find that difficult. Lucy Mangan would understand totally.