Bookworm Quotes

“Adults tend to forget – or perhaps never appreciated in the first place if lifelong non-readers themselves – what a vital part of the process rereading is for children. As adults, rereading seems like backtracking at best, self-indulgence at worst. Free time is such a scarce resource that we feel we should be using it only on new things. But for children, rereading is absolutely necessary. The act of reading is itself still new. A lot of energy is still going into (not so) simple decoding of words and the assimilation of meaning. Only then do you get to enjoy the plot – to begin to get lost in the story. And only after you are familiar with the plot are you free to enjoy, mull over, break down and digest all the rest. The beauty of a book is that it remains the same for as long as you need it. It’s like being able to ask a teacher or parent to repeat again and again some piece of information or point of fact you haven’t understood with the absolute security of knowing that he/she will do so infinitely. You can’t wear out a book’s patience. And for a child there is so much information in a book, so much work to be done within and without. You can identify with the main or peripheral character (or parts of them all). You can enjoy the vicarious satisfaction of their adventures and rewards. You also have a role to play as interested onlooker, able to observe and evaluate participants’ reactions to events and to each other with a greater detachment, and consequent clarity sometimes, than they can. You are learning about people, about relationships, about the variety of responses available to them and in many more situations and circumstances (and at a much faster clip) than one single real life permits. Each book is a world entire. You’re going to have to take more than one pass at it.”
― Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading

“How much more would I have longed for and needed to see myself in my books if I’d been disabled, gay, black, non-Christian or something else outside the mainstream message? By this time – the mid-1980s – writers’ and publishers’ consciousnesses of matters of sex, race and representation had started to be raised. The first wave of concern had come in the 1960s and 70s, mainly – or perhaps just most successfully – over the matter of heroines. There were some. But not many. And certainly not enough of the right – feisty, non-domestic, un-Meg Marchish – sort. Efforts needed to be made to overcome the teeny imbalance caused by 300 years of unreflecting patriarchal history. It’s this memory that convinces me of the importance of role models and the rightness of including (or as critics of the practice call it, ‘crowbarring in’) a wide variety of characters with different backgrounds, orientations and everything else into children’s books. If it seems – hell, even if it IS – slightly effortful at times, I suspect that the benefits (even though by their very nature as explosions of inward delight, wordless recognition, relief, succour, sustenance, those benefits are largely hidden) vastly outweigh the alleged cons. And I’m never quite sure what the cons are supposed to be anyway. Criticisms usually boil down to some variant of ‘I am used to A! B makes me uncomfortable! O, take the nasty B away!’ Which really isn’t good enough.”
― Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading

“The philosopher and psychologist Riccardo Manzotti describes the process of reading and rereading as creating both locks and keys with which to open them; it shows you an area of life you didn't even know was there and, almost simultaneously, starts to give you the tools with which to decipher it.”
― Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading

“Each book is a world entire. You're going to have to take more than one pass at it.”
― Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading

“But for children, rereading is absolutely necessary. The act of reading is itself still new. A lot of energy is still going into (not so) simple decoding of words and the assimilation of meaning. Only then do you get to enjoy the plot – to begin to get lost in the story. And only after you are familiar with the plot are you free to enjoy, mull over, break down and digest all the rest. The beauty of a book is that it remains the same for as long as you need it.”
― Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading

“The intensity of childhod reading, the instant and complete absorption in a book - a good book, a bad book, in any kind of book - is something I would give much to recapture”
― Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading

“. . . the bookworm’s prime directive: any book is better than no book. Always. You don’t necessarily have to enjoy the book — though obviously that’s the ideal, and most books ARE enjoyable — as long as the space inside you that can only be filled by reading is receiving the steady stream of words for which it constantly hungers.”
― Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading

“We are rare and we are weird…there is nothing you can do to change us…Really, don’t try. We are so happy, in our own way…Be glad of all the benefits it will bring, rather than lamenting all the fresh air avoided, the friendships not made, the exercise not taken, the body of rewarding and potentially lucrative activities, hobbies, and skills not developed. Leave us be. We’re fine. More than fine. Reading’s our thing.”
― Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading

“(Top tip: if reincarnation is a thing, you really should try and get reborn as a white, male Christian in the vicinity of 1950s Oxford. Nothing will go far wrong for you after that.)”
― Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading

“When wise old rat Nicodemus is talking to Mrs Frisby about how they live compared to humans, he says: ‘A rat civilisation would probably never have built skyscrapers, since rats prefer to live underground. But think of the endless subways-below-subways-below-subways they would have had.’ I read that huddled in the story corner of Mrs Pugh’s class, and it felt like fireworks going off in my head. It wasn’t just watermelons but the whole world that could be different. It wasn’t preordained, or immutable or, indeed, even anything special. Just ours. Built and organised for us, by us, developed to serve our needs. I closed the book gently, almost reverently, almost as awed by its power to provide me with such new, previously unthinkable thoughts as I was by the thought itself.”
― Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading

“I feel similarly about short stories now. If you’ve got a good idea and a plot, give me more! Give me all of it!”
― Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading

“Being a bookworm does not necessarily mean being a good reader.”
― Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading

“I was twenty-five before I owned an outfit that I liked. I didn’t wear it. I’d never go that far.”
― Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading

“A good story is a good story is a good story.”
― Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading

“. . . if you make usefulness your metric for life it will not be much of a life. I know this because in all fields other than words it is my metric, and I have had no life at all.”
― Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading

“But let us relive . . . a little of those glorious days when reading was the thing and life was only a minor inconvenience.”
― Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading

“You are learning [from the book] about people, about relationships, about the variety of responses available to them and in many more situations and circumstances (and at a much faster clip) than one single real life permits.”
― Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading

“Sendak's favourite fan, though, was a little boy who sent him a card with a little drawing on it. Out of respect for a fellow artist, Sendak went to some trouble with his reply and included a little drawing of his own - of a wild thing - to the boy. He got a letter back from the boy's mother which said 'Jim loved your card so much he ate it.' Sendak considered it the highest compliment he had ever been paid. 'He didn't care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”
― Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading

“I would not make the mistake of trying to find contentment in real life again anytime soon”
― Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading

“This was, after all, a woman who once lauded spinsterhood in an article entitled ‘Happy Women’ on the grounds that ‘liberty is a better husband than love to many of us’, which is nineteenth-century feminist speak for ‘Have you SEEN the state of most of them? JESUS.”
― Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading

“When wise old rat Nicodemus is talking to Mrs Frisby about how they live compared to humans, he says: ‘A rat civilisation would probably never have built skyscrapers, since rats prefer to live underground. But think of the endless subways-below-subways-below-subways they would have had.’ I read that huddled in the story corner of Mrs Pugh’s class, and it felt like fireworks going off in my head. It wasn’t just watermelons but the whole world that could be different. It wasn’t preordained, or immutable or, indeed, even anything special. Just ours. Built and organised for us, by us, developed to serve our needs. I closed the book gently, almost reverently, almost as awed by its power to provide me with such new, previously unthinkable thoughts as I was by the thought itself. Nicodemus, his subways and his skyscrapers are the reason this is still the book I hold up during the periodic rows that break out among adults of a certain stripe about the worthlessness of certain children’s books (and I write this in the full knowledge that I will be coming out, and coming out hard, against Gossip Girl and Stephenie Meyer, but, believe me, I would be going a lot further were it not for Mrs Frisby’s gently restraining paw on my psyche) and assure them that you simply never know what a child is going to find in a book (or a graphic novel, or a comic, or whatever) – what tiny, throwaway line might be the spark that lights the fuse that sets off an explosion in understanding whose force echoes down years. And it enables me to keep, at bottom, the faith that children should be allowed to read anything at any time. They will take out of it whatever they are ready for. And just occasionally, it will ready them for something else.”
― Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading

“Norton was very short-sighted her whole life and the Borrowers’ environment, whether under the floorboards, out and about in the house’s drawing room and nursery or in the fields and furrows across which they travel in the sequels, always has an absolute authenticity about it – the textural truth of someone who has spent her life with her nose squashed up close to things. ‘Where others saw the far hills, the distant woods, the soaring pheasant,’ she once wrote in an essay, ‘I, as a child would turn sideways to the close bank, the tree-roots, and the tangled grasses. Moss, fern-stalks, sorrel stems, created the mise en scène for a jungle drama … One invented the characters – small, fearful people picking their way through miniature undergrowth; one saw smooth places where they might sit and rest; branched stems which might invite them to climb; sandy holes in which they might creep for shelter.”
― Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading

“Blyton is not demanding. She is not an expander of minds like any one of the imaginatively and linguistically gifted authors already mentioned or still to be discussed. Her great gift lies in proving beyond doubt to children that reading can be fun, and reliably so. That the marks on the page will translate into life and colour and movement with ease. This is a thing you can master, a foundation upon which you can build, and also a retreat into which you can escape. She makes it all possible, time and time again. It was for this reason that Roald Dahl – whose own professed primary aim in writing for children was always to entertain them and thus induct them into the world of books – went to bat for her when he was on the 1988 Committee on English in the National Curriculum. He fell out with the rest of the board on the issue of whether her books should be welcomed in schools. Despite being no fan of either the work or the woman (he played bridge with her once and said afterwards that she had the mind of a child) he thought they should be embraced because they got children reading. The rest of the board disagreed and Dahl resigned his place.”
― Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading

“I also remember vividly that unexpected and at the time unprecedented breaking of the fourth wall at the beginning of the book: ‘This is Charlie. How d’you do? He is pleased to meet you.’ That sense of a supportive hand reaching out from the book to take yours is very comforting to a young reader.”
― Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading

“I still have all my childhood books. In fact, I have spent some of my happiest hours in recent months arranging them on the bespoke bookcases…
They made me who I am.”
― Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading

“The Brontës owned a copy of A History of British Birds and by all accounts cherished it. Then again, so would you if it was the only thing available to take your mind off the TB-ridden siblings dropping all around you like flies.”
― Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading