Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives by Lucy Mangan review – never lost for words

The Guardian

16-03-2025

During lockdown, the writer and journalist Lucy Mangan decided to build a shed in her garden that would work both as her office and as a shrine to her book collection, the belated realisation of a long-held dream. Mangan suffers from tsundoku, a Japanese term that may well have been coined simply to torment Marie Kondo: buying books at a rate that outstrips the speed at which you can read them, and keeping them all. Mangan has 10,000. Filling the very many shelves, as she recounts in this memoir, took her ages. She enjoyed every rapturous moment.
'I am never happier than when I am in a bookshop,' she writes, and so of course she creates one for herself. Only reluctantly does she leave its four walls. When not reviewing television shows for the Guardian – even bibliophiles need day jobs – she's in her customised womb, reading. 'If we stop reading, we stop putting ourselves in other people's shoes,' she writes. 'We cut ourselves off from avenues of growth, exploration and adventure.'
Despite a pronounced introversion, Mangan does crave adventure, even if it's of the armchair variety. She is voracious in her tastes, and consumes everything from Victorian classics to airport thrillers to the genre that used to be called chick-lit. Each in their own way has taught her how to live. An example: when adolescence arrives, she bones up on Jilly Cooper to ready herself for the love stuff.
'I did get a boyfriend,' she writes. 'He was nice. When he broke up with me, I was upset but pleased to have the insight.' Frankly, she's relieved to be rid of him. 'You have all the time back for reading that used to be spent lying on his bed trying to avoid his penis.'
After university, Mangan thinks she might want to become a librarian because, well, because books. But she wants to write, too, and ends up doing just that at the Guardian, where she is prone to cower in corners. When one day a colleague catches her nose-deep in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, he is visibly appalled. 'Book snobbery,' she primly notes, 'is among the most dismal of all the snobberies.'
Bookish is the sequel to 2018's Bookworm, and treads pretty much the same path. If that first volume recounted how literature had helped her navigate the mysteries of childhood, then its sequel tackles the myriad complexities of adulthood. She reads to bring herself closer to her book-loving father, and when she is distressed by world events. She makes for a wonderfully incisive critic and can pick apart a George Orwell with the same perspicacity with which she can, say, a Jack Reacher, or the lesser-known Brontë sister, Anne, whose 1848 novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall she adores. But her memoir can also be read as a comic novel, drenched as it is in Sue Townsend snark. Like Townsend, she skewers everyday events for their comedic potential. When, Jane Austenishly, she eventually does bag herself a husband, a 'lovely' historian, she resents the time it takes up. 'A big fuss,' she says of the enveloping wedding plans. 'I wouldn't do anything like it again.'
You might think that her husband – bookish himself – would have known what he was getting into here, but no. Shortly after their wedding, he foolishly suggests they merge their libraries. His new bride is horrified. Does he really know so little about her? Mangan explains that it wouldn't be a merging of their collections, 'it would be a breaking up of mine, an unnecessary intrusion, an act of violence'. And now to the punchline: 'I agreed to have a baby instead.'
There's a BBC Four sitcom here, surely: David Mitchell and Victoria Coren Mitchell, all elbow patches and cracked paperbacks, and love among the margins.
Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives by Lucy Mangan is published by Square Peg (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply