I can't actually review this book dispassionately. Obviously Lucy Mangan wrote it for me. This particular bookworm is only a little older than my eldest child. Her mother is only a little older than me. As a child, her reading choices were my reading choices (apart from Enid Blyton. I wasn't allowed to read her books, and on odd occasions that I came across one, I saw no reason to disobey my mother's wishes. What bilge). And as she was a child of the 80s, her reading choices were my children's reading choices: or mine, in their early years, obviously. And what riches there were to mine!

This book is quite simply a nostalgic memory fest of all the books, so many of them now classics, that enriched both our childhoods - and in my case, the early motherhood years as well. The true friends and teachers that books become for the bookish child is so well celebrated here. They give the lie to a certain grandson's infamous exclamation last year - 'Books? They're so 1950s!' You're wrong Alex. A well-loved book is a friend forever. ( )

The author was funny, but the spoilers, my goodness! There were virtually no warnings. Why?! Why do readers spoil books for other readers?

At about 54%, the author mentions that she's going to talk about [b:Anne of Green Gables|8127|Anne of Green Gables (Anne of Green Gables, #1)|L.M. Montgomery|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1615094578l/8127._SY75_.jpg|3464264]. I haven't finished that series yet, and I don't want to read the spoilers that are apparently inevitable with Mangan.

I'm so disappointed. ( )

Fun to read, and re-visit old favourites. But - no Diana Wynne Jones? No Margaret Mahy? ( )

I guess this is a biblio-memoir. I enjoyed a trip down memory lane as many of the books the author read and loved (or in some cases didn't) as a child mirrored my own childhood reading. There were authors I disagreed on (Dr Seuss) and those I agreed on (Blyton) but overall it was fun to be reminded of them. I was probably less interested in the authors own family story, and in the bits about books I wasn't familiar with. ( )

Were you a bookworm as a kid? I was. I was even voted "Class Bookworm" in 7th grade - a category they made up just for me. I was the kid with the book inside the text book during school lectures. So when I saw this a few years ago, I thought ... maybe. As much as I enjoy most books about books, I figured the title was likely to be an overstatement and I'd be reading a sedate, literary criticism of childhood books. The front flap reinforced this suspicion. Which is why it sat on my shelves for so long.

Oh, how wrong - and kinda right - I was. Lucy Mangan is a true bookworm; back in the day, she'd have given me a run for the title and the award. She was also way better read than I was, so there is some lit criticism here, but it's fabulous lit criticism; she's hilarious and she's rational and she's so very real.

On Enid Blyton:

I can barely bring myself to talk about my Enid Blyton.

Like generations of children before me,
and like generations since (she still sells over 8 million
copies a year around the world) I fell head over heels in
love. No, not love - it was an obsession, an addiction. It
was wonderful.

It was an older girl that got me into the stuff. Becky-
next- door lent me her copy of something called Five on a
Secret Trail. It was a floppy, late 1970s Knight Books
edition with, I believe, the original 1950’s illustrations
inside. I read it. It was good. Very good. I enjoyed it. I
enjoyed it very much. I asked Becky if she had any more.
She did. It was called Five Run Away Together. I read it. It
was good. Very good. Possibly even better than Five on
a Secret Trail. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it very much. I
noticed it had a number '3' on the spine. Five on a Secret
Trail had a '15’. What did that mean? I decided to look for
clues. Even without a loyal canine companion to help me,
it didn't take long. The endpapers carried a
list. Apparently Enid Blyton had written twenty-one
books! What excellent news! What riches! What vital.
absolutely essential riches!

I took the news and the list to my parents. I'm going
to need all of these,' I said, gently.

And so it began.

And on C.S. Lewis' Narnia series being a Christian allegory:

The tale of Lucy Pevensie discovering the secret
world beyond the wardrobe door is a story about
courage, loyalty, generosity, sacrifice and nobility versus
greed, conceit, arrogance and betrayal. You can call the
former Christian virtues, or you can just call them
virtues, let the kids concentrate on the self-renewing
Turkish delight, magically unerring bows and hybrid
man-beasts and relax.

Reading this, I feel like I missed out on something amazing by not living down the road from Lucy. I suspect we'd have had a lot of fun swapping books and comparing notes. But it was a joy to read her memoirs now and in so doing take a trip down the memory lane of my own reading.

Mangan primarily recounts her childhood reading in a fun and often funny style, but she also dips lightly into the historical aspects of Children's literature here and there, when the subject matter seems to call for it - a specific genre, or the roots of illustrations. These bits are less engaging, more straightforward, and in context with the whole, makes the pace drag a tiny bit when you get to them. They're interesting, but they're not entertaining.

Because Mangan's writing style is very conversational, the sentences that include many clauses and often long parentheticals can sometimes be hard to follow. This was probably my only criticism - not that I didn't enjoy the style, because I absolutely did - it's just once or twice, by the time the sentence ended, I had forgotten how it began.

Admittedly, a large number of the books that Lucy Mangan covers are books unknown to me. I expected this because she was growing up in London, and I was growing up in tiny town Florida. But I was delighted at how often our book titles did converge, and how many titles that, even if I didn't read them, I was familiar enough with to easily follow along.

The author has written a few other books, and I enjoyed this one so much, that I'm interested to discover what they're about and see about getting my hands on one or two. ( )