The comfort of curling up with a violent thriller

Tsundokists of the world, unite! You have a new champion in Lucy Mangan, whose follow up to her entrancing memoir of childhood reading (Bookworm) is an unabashed paean to the pleasure of acquiring more books than you could ever possibly read in your life. That does not stop Mangan from trying, and this is a whirlwind tour through her voracious, encyclopaedic adult reading habit, one that not so much offers evidence of ‘how reading shapes our lives’, but how life shapes our reading.

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The ‘forced march’ of patriarchal school set texts in Mangan’s teens is relieved when she inherits a Maeve Binchy doorstopper and first encounters a book that is ‘unapologetically about women’. When postnatal depression descends, she reaches for Lee Child, finding catharsis in his no-nonsense, villain-bashing thrillers: ‘Do you know how many times a day the mother of young children longs to beat the shit out of someone?’ And after the loss of her father, grief dispatches her back, very movingly, to the comforting pages of the children’s classics he gave her.

In fact this is a book by someone for whom reading is life. Mangan takes Flaubert’s maxim ‘Read in order to live’ and runs with it. Or, rather, sits. Reading is better than conversation; curling up with a book is preferable to sociability. Like-minded readers will ‘know to the precise point how much more likely your just-begun thriller is to bring you happiness than going to the planned party this evening’. An unhappy break-up with a teenage boyfriend is even a boon because, as she explains with characteristic forthrightness: ‘You have all the time back for reading that you used to spend lying on his bed trying to avoid his penis.