LitFest ’25: Lucy Mangan – ‘Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives’

Bookish is Lucy Mangan’s sequel to Bookworm, her memoir of childhood reading. If Bookworm chronicles the books that were important in her childhood, Bookish catalogues the books that have been important to her since then. It is a celebration of the joy of reading and how reading can help to get you through the challenges of life. Mangan, who is TV critic for The Guardian and a columnist for the i newspaper, was in conversation with the journalist, Rachel Corcoran.

Bookish reveals an eclectic mix of books that have been important in her life ranging from Jane Austen to Maeve Binchy and Shirley Conran. She likes to buy books out of her comfort zone but basically she likes buying books wherever and whenever she can. She had managed to fit in a visit to Marlborough’s White Horse Bookshop and Oxfam shop before the talk.

Admitting to owning over 10,000 books it is said that Mangan suffers from tsundoku, a Japanese term for buying books at a rate that outstrips the speed at which you can read them, and keeping them all. She also admitted to filling up her Kindle so that it would no longer work and needed some books to be deleted.

She reads fast, around two pages a minute and can finish a book in around 6 hours. However, she has become more selective as she has got older and doesn’t finish everything she starts, discarding a book after 25 to 50 pages if it doesn’t hold her interest.

“Books,” says Mangan, “help us understand people, to put ourselves in other people’s shoes. It would be a very strange world if no one read. The joy of reading proves to us we are not alone, there’s someone reaching out to you across the years.”

Mangan also reveals how reading has helped her through difficult periods in her life, for example when she suffered post-natal depression. “Once I started reading again I was connected back to my old self and I recovered.”

She is currently reading romances. “The world is in such a terrible state, I need something to show that things work out in the end, something cosy.”

Reading has helped her absorb how language works leading to a career as a successful columnist. She is now beginning to write fiction which she finds challenging.

However, reading will always be “a refuge, a solace and the closest thing I have had to a spiritual experience.”