Bookish
How Reading Shapes Our Lives
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- 18,99 US$
Lời Giới Thiệu Của Nhà Xuất Bản
A celebration of books and a love story to the written word that reveals how books help us connect with other readers through shared stories.
As a child, Lucy Mangan was reading all the time, using books to navigate the challenges and complexities of this world and many others. As an adult, she uses her new relationship with literature to seize upon the most important question: (how) do books prepare us for life?
Bookish vividly tells the story of a reader’s life from the cusp of teenagehood, when everything – including the way we read – undergoes a not-so-subtle transformation. Lucy vividly recounts her metamorphosis from young bookworm to bookish adult, from the way school curricula impact our relationship with literature, to the growing pains of swapping the pleasures of re-reading for those of book-hoarding.
Revisiting the books of all genres (from literary novels and historical saga fiction to apocalyptic zombie novels) that ferried her through each important stage of life—falling in love, finding a job, becoming a mother, and navigating grief—Bookish is a coming-of-age story told through books. It's an ode to our favorite bookish spaces (from the smallest secondhand bookstalls to our favorite libraries, mega-bookshops, and our own bookshelves) and a love story to how books not only shelter our souls through hard times, but also how they help us connect with the people we love through shared stories.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British journalist Mangan (Bookworm) delivers a charming account of her reading life. To be "bookish" is to never leave the house without a book, refuse to part with childhood favorites, and always stuff holiday luggage with reading material, according to Mangan, who declares, "Bookish I was born and bookish I shall die." She traces her relationship with reading from adolescence through adulthood, beginning in the 1980s with assigned reading for secondary school English (though initially skeptical of Lord of the Flies, she was wowed by this "book that speaks to pessimists everywhere") and her foray into historical fiction with Light a Penny Candle. While studying literature at university, she realized literary reputations aren't always meritocratic upon discovering the work of Anne Brontë to be more captivating than anything her more famous sisters wrote. After graduation, she shaped her life around books, working first at a bookstore and then as a columnist at the Guardian, and falling in love with and marrying a fellow bookworm. Elsewhere, she shows how books helped her through postnatal depression, the Covid-19 pandemic, and her father's death. This poignant and funny outing (Mangan opens with how she broke her ankle while simultaneously reading a book and walking up the stairs in "an off-brand Slanket") reveals the joys of a life lived among literature. Avid readers will feel seen.
