BOOKISH

Reading like your life depends on it.

Ask journalist and author Mangan what she did as a child, and she will tell you what she read. Her book maps the growth of her mind and body through the pleasures of the text. She never felt more grown-up, she recalls, than “when I first took my seat opposite the newspaper spikes…and started doing my homework [in the library] for the first time.” She goes to university with a great love for Jane Austen. She quotes Virginia Woolf: Austen “was the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness.” And yet, learning about “free indirect discourse” as an undergraduate, Mangan found Jane’s greatness in her way of both “inhabiting and viewing a consciousness at the same time.” The books that Mangan loves, then, are those that bring such consciousness to life. We are the heroes of our own novels, and like all great novelists, we must learn to see our childhood from our own adult perspective. We must become like Dickens or Charlotte Brontë, able to inhabit a young narrator but always to have the perspective of maturity. The best books are those that show the child in the adult and the adult in the child: “The real magic of the books…lies in the seriousness with which the childish pursuits are treated.” She thus advises: Follow “your bookish instincts.” Read not just to escape the world but to live in it, to learn how to negotiate a friendship, hold a job, and find that “precious constant in a life that increasingly seems to have too few of them.” Some live to read. Mangan reads to live.

An enthusiastic paean to the comfort, joy, and self-awareness that we find in literature.