Shirley conran

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. 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

It sounds disingenuous, not to say dis-respectful, but as a writer of 40 books, give or take, I never read blurbs. I can’t bear to. I love stories and am terrified of them being spoiled. There is no obvious twist or murderer so clearly signposted that I will ever try to guess them as I read. I never look at the end first. One of the great joys of books (and of life, more or less the same thing) is being happily surprised. I did accidentally read the blurb of Karen Jay Fowler’s superb We are All Completely Beside Ourselves, which gave away the (gorgeous) twist in the first line.