Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives

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. (Feb.)