READ: Bookworm A Memoir of Childhood Reading
Bookworm: A Memoir Of Childhood Reading by Lucy Mangan
Blog reading time: 2 minutes
This is the perfect book for all book lovers who fell in love with the joy of reading as a child. British author Lucy Mangan’s delightful book not only takes the reader on a nostalgic stroll down literary lane, but also tells the surprising stories behind classic books and the authors who wrote them.
For example, did you know that author E.B White developed Charlotte’s Web from an essay he wrote a year before he resigned from his job at the New Yorker as he turned fifty. His son was moving out of boyhood, and his editor had just died and he felt that his life was changing dramatically. He wanted to write a story that reflected how in the midst of life we are in death, but life goes on regardless.
Mangan also describes the sensation of finding an older and wiser friend and mentor in Judy Blume. Something a lot of us can relate to. Blume was a controversial figure who was the subject of an organized book-banning campaign in the 1980s after Reagan’s election. This was the time before the internet when many young girls were coming-of-age through reading the marked pages in dog-eared copies of Forever that were being passed around the playground. I had the honor of seeing Judy Blume on her last book tour when she was in conversation with actress Molly Ringwald (The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink) at the Castro Theater in San Francisco a few years ago. I remember feeling the emotional energy of a room full of women who all had a story about how her books touched their lives in a meaningful way.
Mangan charts her childhood reading history from her early years reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle and The Tiger Who Came To Tea by Judith Kerr, to titles that helped a coming of age like the Sweet Valley High series and Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene. She explains how the books impacted her and other areas of her life. As Mangan describes it:
““I have lived so many lives through books, gone to so many places, so many eras, looked through so many different eyes, considered so many different points of view. Books have not isolated me - they have connected me.””
Bookworm: A Memoir Of Childhood Reading by Lucy Mangan
