Hello and a happy Sunday to you all! Let’s open with a picture of my bad cat knowing that I want to sit and read:

This week I have been thinking mostly about the Booker and my inadequate nature, my love and dependence on Jean Plaidy (also whether I can pull off a hairslide like fellow fan and fellow Lucy, Lucy Worsley can), and having very pleasant encounters with readers on trains.

I’ve also had the pleasure of doing my Desert Island Books here with Lucy Pearson, a date for your diary if you are anywhere near Colyton, Devon on the evening of Friday 21 August. More importantly, there is a book sale at the same church that day and the next! Fill your boots, for charity!

And I have the pleasure and honour of announcing that I am a patron of this year’s Eastbourne Literary Festival. You can keep up to date with all the festival’s events and doings here, and you can book tickets to my own event on September 25 here. I daresay I shall be roaming around - patronisingly? That sounds wrong - before then as well, so I hope to see you there.

Right - on with the show!

Happy reading!

Love,

Lucy

PS Involves some affiliate links, which may make me a commission but cost you nothing extra

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Booker Books

So, the Booker Prize longlist is here. And, in case you haven’t seen it already, actually here:

• The Shadow of the Object

• Switzy

• Helen of Nowhere

• The End of Everything

• The Disappearers

• Black Bag

• The Renovation

• May We Feed the King

• The Palm House

• The Things We Never Say

• John of John

• All Them Dogs

• The Vivisectors

And, as I do every year, I have thoughts. Well, a thought. And that thought is - “Cor! Once again I have not read a single book on the Booker longlist!”

Do I feel this as a failing? Yes. And no.

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I’ve also been having some thoughts on Queen Camilla’s ‘gift’ of Katherine Rundell’s Impossible Creatures to 870,000 Year Six children, which appears to have been paid for at least in part by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport – ie the taxpayer – which to my and many others’ minds raises a number of questions.

A date for your diaries if you are one for book events - on August 21 I’m in Colyton, Devon and conversation with the lovely Ros Byam-Shaw - tickets here. That’s halfway through a massive booksale that runs 21-22nd, so be here at some point even if you don’t fancy us yakking in the evening!

I hope you’re managing in this heat. London is vile, Norfolk just about bearable and I cling to the certainty that autumn must come if we can all just hang on long enough.

Happy, if sweaty, reading

Love,

Lucy

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My latest book is here

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Happy Beginnings

I’ll tell you what - let’s open with the Wombles rather than murder, shall we? Although it’s going to make for a hell of a segue afterwards. But I’ll worry about that when I come to it.

A few posts ago I talked about the original illustrations of The Wombles by Margaret Gordon. I was secretly annoyed because I couldn’t lay hands on my first edition to show you the real thing. But now I can and I will! Here it is, and here are the bear-like creatures actually envisaged by Elisabeth Beresford when she first came up with the idea of these charming, burrow-based creatures (in the process giving child introverts a dream of living quarters that would never die):

But I had forgotten that the purity persisted through one more illustrator before television got their hands on the beasts and made them into pointy-nosed, hairy (completely different from furry) creatures that the books’ pictures had to follow thereafter. Here is Oliver Chadwick, the last to hold - almost literally - the line:

I would not be without the TV series. But I do much prefer my Wombles as large teddy bears. It gives me - or the me I was - an even greater dose of the cosiness, comfort and security that were, looking back, the thing that I, as a fairly anxious child, loved most about these warm and lovely stories.

SEGUE TIME!

And now - murder! But we’ll begin lightly, with a quiz whose answer has already been pretty much revealed. Which of these ten bestsellers is the odd one out?

The Secret of Secrets

The Divorce

The Names

The Family Friend

The Widow

The Impossible Fortune

The Hallmarked Man

The Correspondent

My Husband’s Wife

Boleyn Traitor.

That’s right - it’s The Correspondent (which I bought last week and still haven’t started, despite longing to, because of stupid life and work and the insistence of this family on being fed and talked to every day). Virginia Evans’ epistolary tale is the only one not to centre round the death of a female character.

Author Wendy Jones pointed out on Instagram that this looks…bad. Unedifying. And at first blush it certainly does. That dead women feature so heavily in fiction across genres (from historical fiction to crime to domestic noir, we can pick out here) undoubtedly says something about readers’ appetites, writers’ preoccupations and thus about society itself.

But - I’m not sure that it necessarily says something bad. And not just because I read a lot of crime fiction and I can’t remember the last one that didn’t contain a female victim. I’m not upset by it. I expect it. I even - and this is where things get tricky - prefer it to a male victim.

I tend not to care about male victims. Adult males, at least - any child involvement, boy or girl is different and in fact I will almost always abandon a book if I’ve inadvertently started one that depends on it. Even with the distance offered by print, it’s too much.

Men dying? Meh. But - honestly - not because they are men. But because it generally portends a story about drug deals gone bad or some other metaphorically bloodless shenanigans. Stupid, greedy decisions about money resulting in plenty of plot convolutions but providing little emotional heft and thus little reader engagement. People who are victims essentially of their own freely-chosen decisions are hard to care about.

When women are murdered in books, it is usually because their decisions have been forced - by lack of options, by people lying to them, pretending to be something they are not, by simple physical overwhelm. They deserve justice and the perpetrator deserves punishment. You care and are compelled to read on.

This divide reflects (in broad brush terms) how murder works in real life. Men are mostly murdered by other men as a result of momentary violence and anger, or as part of their involvement in other criminal activities. Women, famously and grimly, die mostly at the hands of men they know. Two a week are killed by their partners, a figure so astonishing, so appalling and yet so accepted that the cognitive dissonance should cripple us all.

And this, I think, explains why so much crime fiction is written and read by women. This is where we get our justice. This is where we learn survival tactics. This is where we learn what red flags to look out for. This is where we rehearse for worst case scenarios which are still well within the bounds of reality as it is currently constituted. This is where we put and vent our rage at the collective position of our sex, at our vulnerability, at our powerlessness. Crime writers care even if the courts do not. The very coldest comfort, but are we not to take it where we can?

How Many Books Is Too Many Books?

The full story is here and it should be free to read, but the gist is that scholar and writer Mendel Uminar and his collection of 10,000 books were happily living together in a 600 square foot studio apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side (I now have a competitor to my burrow-dreams) until the building management company said he was violating the terms of his lease by accumulating such fire hazards and began eviction proceedings. Uminar fought back for a while, but ultimately moved out.

I think this is further evidence for two beliefs I have long held. The first is that books scare (some) people. They just do. To a certain type of person they represent knowledge that is being kept from them, that is making the owner think he/she is cleverer, better than them and makes them lash out. Usually they don’t have the power to make your life anything other than passingly unpleasant, but obviously this is never true for landlords.

And the second is that the number of books you own in always wrong for someone. If it’s none, that seems wrong to people like me and (probably) you. If it’s hundreds it will seem like silly clutter to some, just right to many, a good start to others. Into the thousands and - well. Madness, fetishism, hoarding, a beautiful dream, an ideal home, still just a good start… Sometimes all at the same time. I certainly view my own collection in different lights at different times and I do not dismiss those who say I’ve gone to far or that I have a psychological rather than simply shelving problem.

But I’m happy. And I hope Uminar, who has now apparently moved into a larger apartment, is too.

Feminism!

Two books I meant to include in the big piece last week and somehow did not are Grow Up, Cupid by June Oldham, one of the lodestars of my teenage life, and the recent piece of non-fiction brilliance by Corinne Low, Femonomics.

The former, originally published in 1986 by Viking and then as part of the Puffin Plus series two years later, which as you will see below is when I got my hands on it (a gift from my dad, the greatest instinctive feminist I have ever known, due simply to the fact he had the strongest, simplest sense of fairness anyone could have).

I loved and love it unreservedly, for containing the first genuinely witty, confident, ebulliently articulate teenage heroine I had ever known (vanishingly rare then, and still rarer than I think there is any excuse for now, but this is a topic we will have to come back to) in Mog. Bored of her boring boyfriend Keith, she swears off men and fills her time by setting up a creche at her new sixth form college so women can attend night classes, writing a romance novel, pretending to be an agony aunt, breaking the spirit of the college principal as thoroughly as she has her previous headmaster, fortifying her daydreamy best friend Josephine and - eventually and completely convincingly - falling in love with fellow student Bysshe, who is (again, first time I’d read such a thing, still rarer than it should be) properly worthy of her.

Oldham’s narrative voice - vivid, funny, gloriously and rhythmically committed to the subordinate clause - was and is a thing of wonder. I will limit myself to one quote, from the first page, otherwise I will end up typing out the whole book. Mog’s mother has just dismissed Aunt Edith’s assumption that Mog is changing schools to finish her A-levels because of trouble with a boy.

But the suspicion had found a vulnerable spot. Ever since the day Margaret [Mog’s full name] had been observed in the Infants’ Playground lifting her dress and showing her knickers to a circle of uninterested boys, Mrs Dermot had feared for her daughter’s morals. The subsequent twelve years spent in tremulous vigilance had done nothing to relieve her anxiety. Her hand shook as she offered Aunt Edith a plate of lemon curd tarts. Noting this, Aunt Edith took two and sniggered.

“Tremulous vigilance”. My heart. The whole book is like this. It’s just wonderful. And ineffably - although I hate this word - empowering on all levels for a teenage girl to read. (Boys had the equivalent in Oldham’s Enter Tom - do seek it out, like Grow Up, Cupid, on the secondhand market. Though I think I am now going to dedicate my life to getting Cupid at least back into print.)

Femonomics came out earlier this year and is a fascinating, granular look at how women suffer financially in all sorts of seen and unseen ways - the unseen ways and their deep, deep roots will drive you demented - that is still, somehow hugely readable and hugely fun TO read. If I were the queen, I wouldn’t give every Year 6 pupil a copy of the dreary Impossible Creatures to mark the end of the National Year of Reading - I’d give them a book token only to be spent on this as soon as they are old enough to understand it.

The tags are for an article based on the book, which I wrote for Good Housekeeping

Then they can move on to Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? and all will soon become much righter with the world.

A Skeleton in the Cupboard

I have begun A Great Reshelving (more on this, much more, next week) and have already been rewarded by the discovery of this 1979 banger:

This was the book that made me realise - or rather, sowed the vital seed for later conscious realisation - that language was a fabulous, beautiful, endlessly fascinating toy. Written by the same Nicholas Tucker, I assume, who wrote The Child and the Book: Psychological and Literary Exploration, which became a key text for anyone interest in - well, the psychology of children and books/literature - it is a collection of famous sayings and very short, heavily-illustrated explanations of what they mean and then (the best bit) at the back, accounts of some of their origins. Suddenly, the words we used had a background, a story, a history of their own. Another world was suddenly opened up, by a flimsy 75p, 48-page Puffin Original - barely more than a pamphlet really - but the gateway to a million stories (how many words are there, anyway?) and a lifetime of deepening joy.

Non-Book Birthday Celebrations!

Got these from Uniqlo (via friends and family who had been carefully pointed in their specific direction) - the trousers in black and brown, the skirt in blue and black. Now, thanks to two of these dresses I bought years ago, I need never shop for summer clothes - the most hateful of all shopping - again!

I saw this on Instagram, of all the rotten places, and fell in love. This so rarely work out, but I have been wearing it ever since - such a gentle colour on (“Invisible” say husband and son, and they are right but yet so wrong at the same time, and you will know exactly what I mean), and makes me feel so happy.

The Week in Books

As well as re-reading Grow Up, Cupid and Femonomics, I read Catherine Ryan Howard’s latest thriller in proof - Buyer Beware. CRH is always brilliant and this is so good. So very, very satisfying.

I bought these:

from Paper Moon and Brazen Head Books in Burnham Market but haven’t started any yet. It’s that life, work, family and feeding thing again, goddammit.

But I have started The Royal Game by Anne O’Brien because it’s about the Pastons and who doesn’t want to read a novel about the Pastons, especially while in Norfolk?

That’s all for this week! I hope you’ve enjoyed reading. If you have, please use any or all of the buttons below to share, subscribe in free or paid form, or buy one of my books. And thank you, as ever, to all of you who already have or do. I am SO grateful.

Love,

Lucy

The Book-Buying Button!

ANDANDAND – I met a subscriber, Janet, in the flesh and that was really, really lovely! She had even gave me this book:

as a present, which I had on my To Be Bought list (Janet did not know this – I take it as proof of how supremely simpatico we all are here at The Bookwormery) and which I cannot wait to read. Thank you everyone who came, and especially to Janet.

Last week I mentioned that I had started reading The Body Myth by Milli Hill and said that “at this early stage it seems to be something like The Beauty Myth for women my age and I mean this as high praise.” Well, I have continued reading it to the end and in short – can confirm. Like Naomi Wolf’s seminal (we have GOT to think of a better word for use in these situations) 1990 bestseller, it’s impassioned but clear, concise and endlessly readable and puts into words loads of things you kinda vaguely thought or felt or wondered about and gives you, at last, a grip on them. Milli – who is on Substack here – has provided The Bookwormery with a code that gives 40% off all pre-orders to give to you, so here it is. Do use it – you won’t be disappointed!

The Body Myth 40% off

It also sent me back to my memories of The Beauty Myth and all the other books that shaped, directly or indirectly, my feminist sensibility and they are what most of the week’s content beneath the paywall is about, plus the name of the misathrope’s misanthrope and introvert’s introvert, plus a paean to the first and only cookery book that has EVER spoken to me (I fkng HATE cooking), plus all the usual more random thoughts, accounts of what I’ve been buying and reading and further recommendations for my fellow bookworms as we burrow down and hope for the weather to break soon.

Good luck, and happy reading!

Love,

Lucy

PS I cannot keep the good news about the cookbook to myself – paean below, but the book itself is Eleanor Steafel’s But First, Dinner and I will know no real peace until I have made her my best friend forever

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But! I have just had my first proper food in five days (bread roll, butter, strong recommend) and am now high on life and eager to share with you the terrible thing that has happened to my library, some thoughts on book organisation (I wanted to do this last week but - this is true - I couldn’t find my copy of Georges Perec’s Brief Notes On the Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books, without which I felt unable to proceed. But I have it now. It was not where I expected, nor where it should have been. The fact that these are two separate places should give you some idea of the level of my talents in this area), my growing love of gardening (I know! I am absolutely unique amongst perimenopausal women) and my problem with nature writing, and my latest book recommendations, via - as ever - a few highways and byways.

Onward! For at least as long as my stomach continues to tolerate the rich feast I have just given it.

Happy reading, and I’m looking forward to meeting at least one subscriber at the Penzance Literary Festival on Thursday that I know of but if there are any more of you please do make yourselves known as well!

Lucy xx

You can buy all my books here

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Partly because it’s been such a difficult week (my son and I have also had a bug, I’ve got my monthly mouthful of ulcers and a mosquito-type thing has bitten me so viciously up and down my leg that it has now swelled up like a blood sausage – my leg, not the mosquito. I slapped that flat with great satisfaction) and I wasn’t sure I was going to be fit on Saturday to write a post, and partly because I’m still trying to find the most suitable format, this instalment of The Bookwormery is in diary form. Chunks, you see, of a week in books, in case I was hospitalized with heatstroke or carted away to the madhouse in sheer screaming frustration with the mercury readings at any point.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy – either as a one off, or as regular (though not weekly) way of doing things. Paid subscribers, as ever, please let me know your feelings in the comments. I think everyone else can contact me in Notes?

If you are considering becoming a paid subscriber then first of all, thank you so much - please do! And second of all, if you use an iPhone, don’t pay-subscribe through the app because Apple adds its cut to your total and makes it more expensive to no-one’s benefit but theirs. So - iPhoners, ignore the button below and subscribe through the website here. Thank you!

And may we all experience happier temperatures soon.

Love,

Lucy

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This week, in amongst marvelling at my first hollyhock blooms of the year and becoming obsessed with my new birdsong app (Merlin - O.B.S.E.S.S.E.D.) I have been fulfilling my daily word quota for the wretched book and dwelling with growing fury on AI as a (part) consequence. You will find some raging thoughts beneath the paywall, along with others of a more pacific variety on the phenomenon of “booksmaxxing” and on books as man-repellers, plus the usual recommendations and bits and pieces.

I hope you are surviving the heat. I think I’ve got about another hour left in me before I die. If it wasn’t for the hollyhocks, I would be begging for winter.

Happy reading.

Love,

Lucy x

You can buy my books here

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The first thing I want to say is that I had no idea it was Independent Book Week and that this post beyond the paywall is largely made up of lists that obliquely express my fury about this (10 Books I Would Have Treated Myself To If I’d Known About This Perfect Excuse for Doing So, and so on), and a few other sundry items. The phrase “sundry items” has just popped up from my subconscious all of a sudden, after years of interment and I am delighted to have it back! Expect to see it OFTEN until the novelty wears off (for me, which may be some time after it has done so for you. Apologies).

As I don’t have an appropriate picture, have one of the hummingbird hawk moth that visited me this week:

What news before we head behind the curtain? (Which you can draw back anytime, incidentally, by becoming a paid subscriber via the button below)

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Good News!

Netflix has launched a new “Watch Your Favourite Books” hub for book adaptations. Excellently, I cannot find any way of accessing it other than typing in “Netflix.com/books” every goddamn time, but maybe you are not so stupid and will fare better. I am without my IT department at the moment (my son is on a school trip) so I await his input next week.

Practical News!

I hope you have all survived this rogue week of winter in June. I am always happy to have a return to cold weather, especially since a friend recommended that I buy this:

We have been together two years now, and our relationship has been life-changing. I bought a cheaper one as back up, and can thoroughly recommend that you don’t do that. It was dismal. This is the one – or at least the level – you want. And it will save you a fortune over the long term.

(This is not an ad or an affiliate link, by the way. Just an attempt to keep us all from freezing.)

I have had a semi-week off work to get on with writing my book so I made bread. In a breadmaker, a supposedly foolproof method. This leaden object is the result, confirming to me that everywhere is metaphor *deletes last 3000 words from draft*

Come and see me at Penzance Literary Festival!

Come and see me at Barkway Literary Festival!

Listen to me talk about books with JR Jamison on American radio here!

Or here!

And please do share, like, follow, free-subscribe or paid-subscribe to The Bookwormery so that we can all immerse ourselves in the world of books for longer instead of going out and dealing with the real world. Because who needs it, babez? Who needs it?

Happy reading, especially in IBW!

Love,

Lucy

You can buy any of my books here

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The bright spots of the week have included:

• The news that a dedicated romantasy bookshop is opening in Oxford very soon – more thoughts on romantasy in general beyond the paywall – and I am always here for a new bookshop opening, especially for a specific fandom, even if I am not necessarily part of it.

• The news that a new stationery shop is opening soon in Forest Hill, SE23 which is near enough my old manor (Catford, SE6) for me to feel proprietorial as well as excited about it. Notebooks are second only to book-books as my greatest financial outlay and weakness) and I can’t wait to visit.

• And once I’ve done that, I’m going to try and get to the House of Stories exhibition at Chatsworth House because amongst the many, many other things on offer, I really want to hear the reading of The Canterbury Tales as it was spoke. It’s on til October, which is good as the idea of me getting anywhere beyond my own back garden within three months has not been a realistic prospect since, I would say, I turned 45 or so. I don’t even lead a busy life. I only have one child, and I’m a terrible mother. How do other people manage to do so many things, let alone so well?

• Finding my copy of Eleanor Parker’s Winters in the World: A Journey Through the Anglo-Saxon Year which I have been looking for ever since the heatwave (though it now seems to belong to the distant past) began. Partly because I began it last year and then lost momentum with it somehow (this is almost always due to stupid Life and almost never to The Book and certainly was not The Book in this case) and have been wanting to get back to it ever since. And partly because it is the perfect armour against summer, for those of us who are at war with temperatures over 25 degrees. It delights in all the seasons, but the cooler ones especially, and conjures up the past so beautifully throughout that it makes summer sound bearable too.

  

• I now have 25 apple-of-Peru seedlings, have potted up my first one and it seems to have survived. I think I shall reward myself by re-reading these Beverley Nichols

  

• I sent out the latest batch of book bundles to founder members of The Bookwormery. I got a bit carried away so the postage costs mean this endeavour is now running at a loss but I hope you each find something in yours that hits the spot. They are a joy to do, but I just have to hope that they land – literally and metaphorically – all right.

  

Beneath the paywall, in addition to my romantasy ruminations, are thoughts on reading my first Agatha Christie, my report on the week’s book acquisitions and consumption, and a chunk about book writing too. I was also planning to include an attempt to get my feelings about AI in order, but my mental and emotional resources proved too depleted. I kept putting my head down on the keyboard and then finding I didn’t even have it in me to cry. I’ll give it another go next week - the writing about AI, not the crying. Hopefully.

Happy reading, everyone!

Love,

Lucy

You can buy my books here

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Anyway, I’m going to write to the manager immediately with a proposal that they establish Reader-in-Residence position – they already have the sofas! Third floor! I’ll choose my own cushions in Soft Furnishings, my pleasure - and providing an extremely short list of inaugural candidates.

In other news:

• I have worked out how to identify founding member subscribers, so those who haven’t already let me know whether they would prefer a book bundle or a chat will be getting an email soon containing that very question, and bundles will go out as soon as I have addresses. If anyone is still waiting for his/hers, a million apologies - another batch is going out next week, and I thank you for your patience almost as much as I do all of you for signing up in the first place; which is to say - ENDLESSLY.

• Thank you too to all those who responded so supportively to my Note earlier this week about whether I should make myself a mimosa at 11 o’clock one morning for no other reason than that I wanted one. In fact, your support was so great that I waited an hour, upgraded to a Nio cocktail and spent most of the afternoon unconscious. I feel hugely restored by the entire experience.

• The Beauty Banks charity, which provides hygiene and period products to those who can’t afford their own is having a huge auction and raffle with incredible prizes (everything from a bespoke mixtape from Lauren Laverne to signed books from Jenny Colgan and artwork from Nadia Shireen, via loads of absolutely gorgeous beauty products, experiences and lessons from experts) here. You can bid and buy tickets for the next two weeks and, of course, donate any time!

• You can buy Bookish on Kindle for 99p until midnight on Sunday here.

And the rest of my books are here:

They get their own button!

Beneath the paywall you can read about the latest book-related revelation nudging me towards nervous breakdown (and Caitlin Moran’s new book trying to hold it back), time-travelling romantic adventures, grown-up Milly-Molly-Mandy books, when ragebait lit is not ragebait lit, an update on gardening disasters plus the books I’ve bought and read and the Substack posts I’ve loved this week.

Happy reading, y’all and if you like the sound of anything above, just click the subscribe button and it can all be yours for the low, low price of £6 a month or less!

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The four books I read this week were If Books Could Kill, Dissection of a Murder, The Sisterhood of Invisible Murderers and One of Us Is Guilty, which is about a murder. You could almost begin to spot a theme.

I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that my son is (supposed to be) revising for a battery of tests that are coming after half term (more on that, and the frothing madness induced by the fact that this genuinely seems to require not looking at a single physical book at all). I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that I am still largely living with my mother in London as she recovers from injury and that I do not do at all well with my mother being in any way vulnerable. We were not brought up to believe this was possible. It is deeply unsettling. You should think of me, essentially, as a duckling imprinted with (on? By?) the Terminator – T1000 model, not that shonky original – to understand the full extent of my discombobulation. And I’m sure it has nothing to do with - *gestures widely at a world ruled by madmen, paedophiles and billionaires, none of them mutually exclusive categories* - anything else. Just the mood I’m in, I guess. We can blame the menopause, I suppose. I mean, I’m sure that’s not helping.

Anyway, good for books, offering the relief of any antisocial impulses I may be harbouring through the non-criminal means of printed words and alternative worlds and enabling me to contact you from my study rather than a holding cell. It could, currently, be so different.

Below the paywall are some thoughts I’ve been having about the Guardian’s 100 Best Books List and why I didn’t contribute to it (and yes, in case you were looking to the obvious answer, I was - as writer and reader in relatively good standing over there – asked to), some other thoughts about what I am going to call The Yesteryear Discourse, because this is my newsletter and no one can stop me, plus of course recommendations, new purchases, little things that have delighted me, the stationery hill I will die on, and a working through of some gardening trauma that may yet see me having to turn to macrame, needlepoint or Class B drugs to see me through retirement, instead of becoming a green-fingered guru raising endless bounty from the loamy soil as planned.

If any of that appeals to you at all, please do subscribe! If you’re not sure, then just follow along for a bit or have a nose round previous posts (or what I write for The Guardian) and see if you like my writing and/or The Bookwormery’s…look, I’m going to say ‘vibe’, even though I’ve already used ‘discourse.’ I’m sorry. It’s clearly been a more difficult week than I thought. But reading, and writing about books for you always help - so onward and upward! And I hope that if you’ve been having a crap week too, it might give you a bit of fun as well.

Love,

Lucy

A date for your diary - I’m doing an event at the Penzance Literary Festival on Thursday July 9^th – do come! Tickets here Lucy Mangan at Penzance LitFest 2026: BOOKISH: A LOVE LETTER TO READING, LUCY MANGAN IN CONVERSATION WITH LIN ROGERS

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I am currently being blackmailed. By my own agent. Here’s how. A few weeks ago I wrote (here) of my new book crush, Laura Wood, and how much I was looking forward to her new book (Kiss Me Like You Mean It, out August 13). It turns out that my agent is her agent too! How lovely. Then my agent wrote to me saying that she had, as agents tend to do, a very early proof copy of the book. Would I like it? How lovelier! Yes please! Great, she said. As soon as you hit 35,000 words on your own book and send them to me, you can have it.

I can’t work out if this is massively unethical or genius behaviour. It may, of course, be both.

Either way, I’ve been working like a dog for the last week. EVEN THOUGH I was also having to transition to a new laptop AND get my hair cut, two of the worst things that can happen to anyone.

Below the paywall are some thoughts I’ve been having in between raging against/standing in awe of the blackmailing, on books that are the exception that proves the rule, what bookworms mean when we say we are behind on our reading and, of course, the usual recommendations and suggestions list drawn from what I *have* been reading and what I am looking forward to reading next.

Happy weekend, everyone. May it be full of books that hit the spot.

Love,

Lucy

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*****

First of all I of course want to say THANK YOU and SO MUCH to everyone who has become a paid subscriber or founder member since my last post. I am so grateful and eager to bring you more and different things over the coming weeks, months and – cor, who knows?! – years as we get to know each other better and my technical skills become…well, come into existence, really.

And thank you too to all the free subscribers who have stayed and the many who have joined in the last week as well. I hope you find something here that you like. I’d be delighted if you found enough to tip you into an upgrade, but I am glad to have you under any conditions!

*****

Could I ask founder members to make themselves known to me in the DMs, and tell me whether you’d like a book bundle or a Zoom call? I didn’t realise you wouldn’t be readily identifiable in the backstage area so that I could contact you – I’m so sorry to put the burden on you instead, but I can’t see a better or quicker way round it at the moment though I am still investigating.

****

Here I am, enjoying myself at the Swindon Literary Festival earlier this week.

I’m not sure the audience is – I look to be haranguing them pretty intensely – but nobody threw any tomatoes and I met some lovely people afterwards in the signing queue for Bookish, so I count the day a success. Plus I met Alice Jolly, who wrote the astonishingly clever and moving The Matchbox Girl, AND I had a cuddle of the hugely beautiful and good-natured baby grandson of the festival organiser Matt Holland before I went on. I now must become famous enough to make the latter activity a non-negotiable clause in my rider before any event.

My books are available here

****

Did you see this story? A 900-year-old typo may solve Chaucer mystery Ye olde father of English literature refers to the Tale of Wade (a medieval poem or tale lost to us apart from a single 12^th century fragment found in 1896) in both The Canterbury Tales and in Troilus and Criseyde and no-one has ever understood why, because the fragment refers to “elves” and seems to be out of keeping with Chaucer’s works. But! Scholars have discovered that “elves” is a miscopying by some poor, knackered scribe of “wolves” – which makes everything far more realistic and fitting and solves a question that has been niggling at people for centuries. Not many people, for sure, but that is partly what makes this kind of story my absolutely favourite kind of story. Something doesn’t have to matter to many for it to matter at all. And it also enables me to dream that somewhere in an alternative universe – maybe populated by both elves and wolves – I too spend my life sifting through scraps of manuscript found in ancient libraries and piecing together lovely bits of the past.

****

My brilliant friend Sali Hughes co-founded and runs, with her equally brilliant friend Jo Jones, the charity Beauty Banks. It provides hygiene, beauty and sanitary products to people who need them and can’t afford them and has just partnered with Bio Sculpture to produce this rather lovely set of nail polishes and all profits - £15 a set – go to Beauty Banks. It’s a hard time for all charities, so if you are in the market for a beauty treat for yourself or someone else, do see if this one hits the spot. My set hasn’t arrived yet, otherwise I would show to you it up close and personal – though possibly not applied, as I have the hands of a chubby seven year old and, much as I love wearing nail varnish (so cheering to watch coloured-in fingers as I type), I do look ridiculous in it.

****

My friends and I generally light upon a new, temporary hate-figure at least once a week – it’s our cardio - and our current one is the husband in this:

The kindness of strangers: ‘That quilt serves as a daily reminder of all the goodness in this world’ | Australian lifestyle | The Guardian

We’re not wrong, are we? I look forward to unpacking in the comments…

*****

Thank you all, once again, for being here. The ‘proper’ weekly post – preview ‘n’ paywalled bits - will be on Saturday. I hope to see you there too. Until then, happy reading!

Love,

Lucy xx

This is a conversation space for paid subscribers and founder members - kind of like a group chat or what I’m told even the young folk are no longer calling a live hangout. I’ll post questions and any bits of news that come my way and I think might interest you or be useful and you can jump into the discussions anytime.

Hope to see you there!

Lucy xx

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Hello and welcome to a bit of a relaunch now that I have got some semblance of a grip on this here Substack thing. I’m so glad I started The Bookwormery. I’ve met such lovely people here, and I look forward all week to sharing my biblio-thoughts and my latest book discoveries with you.

Which means, however, that it is taking up more and more of my time and I’m having more and more ideas of what I want to do here, which will take up more time still. And that means that I’m about to do The Thing and set up paid subscriptions. There will still be occasional free posts but paying subscribers will get at least four newsletters a month, we’ll start the chat ball rolling too and do Q&As about different topics, plus of course you’ll get access to the archive. And if you become a founder member, you can choose whether you would like a book bundle (a mixture of new and pre-loved-but-that-I-can-just-about-bear-to-part-with) on top of that or to have a Zoom call with me. The latter doesn’t have to be entirely about books. Short of financial, medical or sexual advice, there’s nothing we can’t discuss. If you’re peri/menopausal too, we can just sit and cry together or smash things. I am a broad church.

What Money Means

I’m hoping that going paid will allow me to spend more time here, and allow me to delve deeper into other book-related matters. I’d like to talk more about writing as well as reading, and indeed about creativity generally, perhaps tied to what I’m learning in real time as I try to write my first ‘proper’ novel.

In fairness, I must warn you that I can also feel myself moving into my gardening era (but is not gardening an expression of creativity too?!) so there could be plant talk incoming. God, maybe I’ll even start a real wormery! I am FASCINATED by compost…But I digress. I blame the aforementioned peri/menopause, about which there may also be future talk. I cannot contain this amount of rage forever. It’s not safe.

So! Please consider becoming a paid subscriber if you can. But whether free or paid, do keep liking, sharing, commenting as much as you can so we can reach the rest of the quiet army of bookworms out there and let them know that there is the world’s quietest mess hall here where they can come and relax in peace. And always, please, let me know what else you want to see, so I can shape this place accordingly.

And now – if I have done things correctly, and I think we all know there is no guarantee of that whatsoever – comes the inaugural paywall, and beyond it my thoughts on the boxes bookworms and the bookish are put into, my attempts to build a library of alternative delights for my friend’s new baby (and leave it to the devoted parents and grandparents to furnish the Hungry Caterpillars, Wild Things, and Each Peach, Pear and Plum), and of course my own week’s consumption. I really hope to see you on the other side but wherever you are, as ever – happy reading!

Love,

Lucy xx

PS My latest book, Bookish: Love Letter to Reading is 99p on Kindle all May

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Anyway. Act II is now behaving itself and all I have to do now is write it up. That sounds like a bitter-laughter line and it is, but not entirely. Because it’s the plotting that kills me. The working out of when things should happen and, oh God, the working out of why. I now have three pages of yellow A4 covered with black writing, green annotations and then red footnotes to the annotations that are more precious to me than life itself. It might not look like much reward for a week’s industry but it is drawn from innumerable pages of handwritten notes, 34,000 words of nearly indecipherable typing from my Notes app1 and a handful of uncatalogued WhatsApp messages to my husband and I couldn’t be happier.

(Actually I could. Please see my other ongoing project below - the Great Annual Sock Reunification 2026, with accompanying feline assistance. No, of course I don’t mean to live like this. I just do.)

The writing, comparatively speaking, is a doddle. A pleasure. Or at least, something I know much better how to do. I know what’s in my wheelhouse (jokes, set pieces) and what is not (emotions, interiority - journalism is not good training for this). I know what I’m likely to get stuck on (metaphors, mostly) and the parts I can expect to go relatively smoothly (see jokes and set pieces above). All of which means that I feel in control and can pace myself properly - if I know a hard bit for me is coming up, I will do it in the morning before I am buffeted and knackered by the day’s vicissitudes and other work can take the afternoon non-premium slot, and vice versa if there’s an easy narrative stretch coming up. Plotting is like running myself repeatedly into a brick wall hoping that it will crack before I do. Writing is not. Thank the Pope, as my grandma used to say.

But! On the downside - must there always be a downside? Yes, my friends, yes there must. My grandma was quite clear on this too - I have not been able to read. I have only been able to watch Melissa McCarthy films and reruns of Superstore2. This happened the last time I had a good week with The Book so I feel able to label this tentatively as a legitimate phenomenon. Journalistic practice holds that there has to be three of something before it’s a trend but given how long the gap was between the first two good weeks with The Book, I don’t have time for that. And anyway, I can feel the truth of it and that counts for something here.

I can feel the same, or very similar, or very much overlapping part of my brain at work during either activity, you see, and I can only presume this is because reading and writing are both creative activities, drawing from the same tank - the latter at a higher rate than the former, perhaps, but both depleting it.

At the same time, I was longing to read. I needed to read. But my brain was clearly trying to protect its deeply limited imaginative resources. It took me a long time to work out the solution to this conundrum - you are probably there already - but then it took me many years of having one and a half cups of coffee in the morning (one not enough, two just too much) and throwing the rest away before I realised that the answer lay in using a slightly bigger mug, so that’s how that happens.

The solution, of course, was to dose myself with non-fiction. Duh. Even more radical than that, it was to dip into non-fiction. And then out again! And then maybe back into the same one later, but more often than not, a different one. And then start working my way round in a sort of unofficial, very unstrict rota system. Thus I have made inroads into Roland Ennos’s The Wood Age and Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change our Minds and Shape Our Lives3 (both of them fascinating and soothing at the same time), The Green Ages: Medieval Innovations in Sustainability by Annette Kehnel, Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape by Cal Flyn (both of these slightly counting as research, which also helped calm me down), Simon Barnes’ The History of the World in 100 Plants (because who could NOT read a book called The History of the World in 100 Plants? Also, the second chapter was on wheat, so that counted as research too), and Going Infinite: the Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, Michael Lewis’s take on Sam Bankman-Fried. Though I may have to put the last one away for a bit because my appetite for hearing about the inner workings of a tech billionaire’s life/mind/company is inversely proportional to the probably moral duty to face it. I will return when I have got Act II written and am therefore feeling invincible.

Buy books I HAVE written here

A Date for My Diary, Certainly, and Maybe Yours

Alice Jolly and I are at the Swindon Literary Festival on May 9 (tickets here) talking about Bookish, The Matchbox Girl, the power of books generally and children’s books especially so do come!

There is also Winnie-the-Pooh’s centenary this year, marked by a a special edition of the honeyed works, events in Ashdown Forest and doubtless merch aplenty. I am going to celebrate by reading the books for the first time. I didn’t have them as a child (I don’t know why. Maybe my book supplier - Dad - didn’t like them or have them on his radar, or maybe he worried that if Eeyore and I met we would disappear into a depressive sunset together) and I somehow haven’t managed to catch up since. So, come the summer and a shady tree, we shall meet at last.

Happy reading, everyone

Lucy x

And a second apology - I am also a week off sending the Bookish copies from the giveaway. I’m so sorry. I will be back on top of things as soon as possible.

And now, to other business!

Affairs of the Heart

Over the fortnight, as if to make up for the roiling stupidity of life going on elsewhere, I fell in love. It’s wonderful when it happens, isn’t it? A rare and precious delight. My new beloved is Laura Wood. She specialises in romance novels, which are still a new area for me and my only worry is that now that I have found her I will stop playing the field and exploring other excitements. But I have learned from my sex life, and will not make the same mistakes again.

But Laura! Oh, Laura! I have torn through Under Your Spell, Let’s Make a Scene and A Single Thread of Moonlight in the last few days and been both transported and comforted by them all (and am looking forward to devouring A Snowfall of Silver and A Sky Painted Gold at the weekend) but it is the Aviary trilogy that truly has my heart. The Agency for Scandal, A Game of Scandal and A Season for Scandal are set at the tail end of the Victorian era and centre round a secret detective agency – said Aviary - run by women, led by the redoubtable Mrs Finch, for women. It protects those whom the law overlooks and delivers, should it prove meet and right to do so, a deeper, more…bespoke justice wherever possible. Each book centres round a new recruit to the Aviary. In the first, there is impoverished aristocrat Izzy, left to provide somehow for her family in the wake of her fiscally irresponsible father’s death. The middle volume deals with mathematical genius Felicity who is denied by social convention the life of the mind she craves in and the final (so far?) story is about the ebullient florist and gardener Marigold who escapes the clutches of a fiancée who seeks to make her smaller and less colourful in every way, but who is left with the problem of providing for her family without a husband’s income too.

Deeply satisfying adventures ensue, infused with humour (real humour – organic jokes, character-led gags, you know? Real stuff) and romance. Each of our heroines meets her perfect man during their employment with the agency, and the real joy and genius of the books is that each is perfect for her and her alone. Wood doesn’t deal in ciphers, she deals in soulmates and it is balm to one’s own soul to read and root for them.

Technically the Agency books are upper-age-limit YA, but they are good for what ails ye at any age. And if – ahem – you are old enough to dream of being the all-seeing, all-powerful, patriarchy-suborning Mrs Finch rather than a starry-eyed new recruit full of vim, vigour and optimism, let me tell you you can do that too.

And if, like me, you are constitutionally incapable of not recoiling when you see, hear, read or otherwise contemplate the word “romance” please join me in overcome this (natural, instinctive) mistrust/disgust. Modern romance is not the sappy, pukesome thing of long ago – if indeed it ever was (the older I get, the more I see that misogyny, both external and internal, has led to most things being labelled wrongly). As I say, I am only at the beginning of my exploratory operations but I haven’t hit a dud offering yet. Jenny Colgan, Harriet Evans, Stephanie Butland, Sarra Manning and Beth O'Leary are all good, safe places to start if you are daunted, suspicious, easily nauseated or any combination of the above. Enjoy! You will, you know.

That’s what I love most of all about books, I think. Their patience. Their willingness to wait. They don’t change their contents, they don’t compromise for you – they say “We’re here, if and when you’re ever ready.” You can take them down off the shelf every now and again and see if you speak to each other yet – and if not? No harm, no foul. You both just go about your day. In an increasingly shouty, insanely reactive, judgmental world I find this a greater and greater solace.

My books are available here

Thing Two! I Am Now a Conspiracy Theorist

Last week – or rather, last post, sorry again – I ranted about the announcement by Amazon that support for the older models of Kindle, be they ever so physically fit for purpose, would be withdrawn on May 20, thus rendering about 2m of them more or less useless. The next day, my Kindle stopped working. My entire 3,000-strong library vanished. The content came back with a hard reset but has not functioned properly since. Coincidence? I think not. Jeff’s coming for me. I shall barricade myself in my bookroom, of course.

The Week in Books

Well, it was Laura mostly, wunnit? But I did also read the new Karin Slaughter in proof. The Secrets We Hide is out on June 18 and oh my God, this woman never misses. Truly a god amongst crime writers.

In lieu of other things I’ve read, here are books which I haven’t ready but are out soon and that I am looking forward to, in the hope that they might pique your interest too:

A Creative Compass: Finding Your Way to a Creative Life by Emma Gannon – because I want one of those

The Black Death: A Global History by Thomas Asbridge – because I loves me some plague

Anxietyland by Gemma Correll – because I’ve got to give it to several hundred people

You’ll Be Sorry by Lisa Gardner – because she’s another crime writing god. But - *drops voice to a whisper* - she sometimes misses.

Time Travel for Beginners by Jaclyn Moriarty – because time travel! Via a special agency! Maybe I only read about agencies now?

The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society by James Marriott - because, duh

And last but by no means least - the new Laura Wood of course! Kiss Me Like You Mean It is out on August 13. See you in the queue.

And Finally – hero of the week and possibly all other weeks

This guy - Gary Hollis

Why? Because he was arrested for re-entering a Barnes and Noble bookstore in Oregon after it had closed to finish a book he’d been reading there. The shop had closed as he reached a plot point that was “completely untenable to sit with overnight.” We raise a glass, and possibly funds for a statue in the fullness of time.

Happy reading, wherever you do it, everyone

Lucy x

Not exactly the same as someone coming to take all your knickers (not least because I would in many de-elasticised cases be profoundly grateful if someone would take them off my hands and lay them decently to rest at last, whereas if someone tried to winnow my book collection – well, that would be an ill-advised move). And partly because Amazon is not attacking the books as their carrier, but I couldn’t find an analogy about setting fire to shelves without having to explain that it was a conflagration that wouldn’t immediately consume the books and it all got a bit complicated…

Let me start again, and knickerless, as it were. And have a picture of a Reeve’s pheasant my husband met in Norfolk, in the meantime. (I am at my mother’s so there are NO BOOKS) and many thanks to Alex Rafinski, who identified it for us.

Amazon has announced that on May 20 it is going to stop supporting any Kindles released (I nearly said ‘born’ then) during or before 2012, which is about two million of them currently in use (including, I think, mine but I haven’t checked yet because that’s hardly the point.) Owners – though that now hardly seems the mot juste - will continue to be able to read e-books they’ve already downloaded and to access their accounts and Kindle Libraries via the mobile and desktop app, but they can all say sayonara to buying or borrowing any new content.

Now, as someone who is not even entirely clear on why electricity does not leak out of sockets and who thought the much-mocked American politician who described the internet as “a series of tubes” sounded like a tech god, I do not pretend to understand the ins and outs of all the stuff I have read about the necessity or otherwise of Kindle updates, whether the amount of support provided over the last 14 years or more compares favourably with that offered by other corporations and conglomerates. I know this and only this: we were right. All of us here, my fellow bookworms, we were all right. The book is a perfect piece of technology. The codex, that little stack of paper bound at one edge and printed with any one of an almost infinite array of letter combinations, beats code. We always suspected it. Now we have proof.

More proof, I should say. Or proof of how much deeper the rot goes that we realised. Even the least tech-savvy of us have been aware since at least 2009 that everything we have on Kindle is only on licence. That was the year Amazon pulled copyright-infringing copies of 1984 – I know, the irony makes this story so delicious it’s got to be fattening – that it had accidentally included instore from the devices of people who ‘owned’ them (and refunded them), without warning, explanation or permission.

But I must say it had never occurred to me until now that Jeff could also effectively pull the physical device too. But of course he can! And of course he will! And of course he has! The enshittening of life is real and it continues apace, usually at the behest of a billionaire.

My book collection* is beginning to look like the best investment I ever made, and not just because as a freelance writer for the last 20 years I have made no others. It – obviously – provides a range of delights and entertainment and reference material. Nothing in there has been created by AI. I own it all outright – including the shelves. No one can take it away from me. Even bailiffs, should my lack of traditional investment come back to bite me in the arse after retirement – there’s no resale value to what a man who once came to interview me for a magazine once described as “a jumble sale hoisted on the walls.”

Were it not for the fact that it stands not only in mute testimony to guaranteed reading pleasure e’en unto death but also to the aforementioned enshittening of life in every other way, I would be feeling pretty good right now.

Let’s have a picture of a Norfolk camellia now to cheer ourselves up.

The Footnote

*I would usually call this ‘my library’ rather than ‘my book collection’ but I was recently accused in a (different) magazine column of “left wing boasting” by doing so. Like most people, I don’t want to be seen as boasting, especially when I’m not (actually, is that true? Would it not be worse to be seen as boasting when we ARE? Answers on a postcard – no, in the comments! – please).

Either way, if I’ve ever come across as a boasty-boaster (to borrow Marian Keyes’ excellent phrase), left wing or otherwise (if it helps, I’m possibly more of a centrist these days, but honestly things change so fast I can’t be sure) – I apologise. When I mention my library meant to be a sharing of the delight I take in having realised this lifetime ambition, and at worst – I think – a bit of a celebration. If I’ve misjudged my tone rather than my audience – who at least at book events ask after it and seem to like to hear about it like people like to hear about how a baby or a new pet is getting on – then I can only apologise. But I reckon I’ll proceed on the assumption, especially here on Substack, talking to people who have willingly subscribed, that most people take it the right way and I can count myself amongst friends.

A giveaway!

If this is not more boasting – I have just been sent my author copies of Bookish: A Love Letter to Reading from Pegasus Books, my US publisher. There are ten (hardbacks - same cover as in the link but the book is maybe a little bit bigger?) and I have no friends left who have not already had forced upon them either the UK hardback or paperback author copies, so – would you like one of these? They’re very nice. If so, send me a direct message and I shall send them out on a first-come-first-served basis, and hope very much that you like them.

The Week in Books

I’m afraid I don’t have time to do links this week – Mum is ill, deadlines are pressing and assorted other shit is hitting the fan – but do head to uk.bookshop.org or Waterstones if anything takes your fancy, won’t you?

Meet the Newmans by Jennifer Niven – very much in the Lessons in Chemistry vein (50s/60s housewife finds herself) but I enjoyed it a lot more

The Bestseller by Jenny Kingsby, out in June – twisting, clever, compulsive thriller about a therapist, a patient, a best friend, men and coercive control

The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz – the sequel (you see what she did there?!) to her brilliant bestseller The Plot. Almost as good. Not quite.

Go Gentle by Maria Semple, out tomorrow – feminist romance-art-heist-caper with a primer on Stoicism thrown in. No, really. I wish it had cohered a little more, and I will definitely take a full-length novel about the ‘coven’ (of the entirely non-supernatural kind) living in an Upper West Side apartment block that it looked like it was going to be about, but I enjoyed myself hugely nevertheless.

Happy reading!

Love,

Lucy

Second of all, a follow-up to last week’s post. I mentioned that I’d bought the world’s greatest pen and a lot of you have asked for further details. It is The Wren pen from Tom's Studio and I love it. It was not cheap (£35) but I had been looking for a refillable, non-disposable but non-fountain-pen-pen for AGES and I’m calling it an early birthday present to myself. I got it in Ivy and it looks like this:

And we will talk about the very important matter of stationery properly soon.

Meanwhile, to this week’s thoughts.

So - I handed in 20,500 words of the first draft of my new book (20,559 actually – but who’s counting?) to my agents just before the Easter weekend and, as I am now experienced enough to expect and anticipate with joy, my reading mojo came back with a vengeance.

By reading mojo, I mean the full measure of love I have for and joy I take in reading. I (almost) always have some – even in the depths of despair or grief, because reading is a solace – but it took me a long time to realise that it becomes eroded while I am writing a book.

(Maybe it also does while I am writing columns or book reviews but because I have done that daily for so long I no longer notice, and it should now just be counted as my baseline mojo? If I ever take two weeks off and can determine anything through the panicked haze brought about by not working – will everyone sack me while I’m gone? Will I ever work again? Will I have lost the ability to write at all? – then I will be interested to find out.)

Some of the reasons for this erosion are relatively obvious. You need to get away from the printed word for a bit, just as you need to get away from your desk or, if you are a teacher, children, an accountant Excel spreadsheets, or an Evri customer complaints handler the whole world.

Then of course there is the problem of the unstoppable running comparison and commentary your stupid, treacherous, self-sabotaging brain makes between any book you settle down with in the evening and the abysmal words THE DRIVELLINGS OF AN IDIOT you have just put down on paper LIKE THE ARROGANT MISGUIDED FOOL YOU ARE or typed onto a screen AS IF YOU’RE SOMETHING SPECIAL during the day THE WASTED WASTED DAY WHEN YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN DOING A PROPER JOB INSTEAD OF DRIVELLING.

I mean, that’s a given.

But generally, after a bit, you can switch that inner voice off. You can tell it that you are not comparing like with like – a published book has generally moved miles from its first draft form NOT ALWAYS SOME PEOPLE MANAGE TO GET IT RIGHT FIRST TIME WE CALL THEM PROPER WRITERS? and been shaped by many helping hands along the way, from beta readers to agents to editors NOT THAT THEY’LL BE ABLE TO DO ANYTHING WITH THE PAGES YOU HAVE WHICH YOU MIGHT AS WELL HAVE WIPED YOUR BUM ON and what you hold in your hands is the product of much more time and work than you have yet spent on your creation OH CREATION IS IT? GET YOU. UP YOUR FUNDAMENT MUCH, ARE YOU?

Or you can drink wine and pop a pregabalin filched from your late father’s collection after he died and quiet things down that way. I imagine.

Slightly less obvious but more interesting – and a little less soul-destroying – I think is the connection it suggests between reading and writing as both creative acts.

(OH CREATION AGAIN IS IT – Shh. Shush now)

Because as some clever and succinct internet person once put it – reading is staring at slices of marked tree and hallucinating vividly for hours. But those hallucinations are not effortless. We induce them. We read, interpret, understand and then – imagine. And all differently. Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy (at least until the 1995 adaptation of P&P arrived), Heathcliff (at least until you see Laurence Olivier in William Wyler’s 1939 Wuthering Heights, because lemme tell you – Jacob Elordi could never) and any other character, or place, or landscape or bed or chair or cat or dog we ever meet in our minds courtesy of another person’s evocation will never be the same as your neighbour’s interpretation. Unless he or she has also seen the right P&P and WH on screen, but this is a needless complication and we shall move swiftly on.)

The point is, you use a lot of your brain to read. I think we sometimes forget that when we feel bad about not doing it more, or worry about the status of reading as a pastime in the modern world. Modern life is demanding. Too demanding. I am no fan of modern life, outside its medical benefits and Brooklyn Nine Nine. It does not leave anywhere close to as much space or peace as it did for earlier generations and that we need as human beings simply to preserve all our equilibria, let alone forge ahead with art and culture and making more Brooklyn Nine Nine (even that dropped off in season eight).

And so, of course, It doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t push back against The Way Things Are and reclaim as much of space, peace and other valuable things as we can, but it does mean that doing so takes energy too - we are not pushing at an open door - and that, regrettably, we have to accept some of it as another inescapable new normal. And not feel bad when we can’t manage as much of the hallucinating at tree slices as we’d like or think we should.

This Week’s Books

So, as discussed, I’ve had a great week.

I read – yomped through, really, in as close to single sittings as it is possible to get these days – the following:

The Housewife by Natalie Barelli - so much fun, so well worked out and with a genuinely off-kilter heroine, which is so hard to do. Now keen to read her others and she seems pretty prolific, so colour me happy. Love a new discovery with a back catalogue. Takes me back to that heady day when I discovered that Enid Blyton had written slightly more than than the three Secret Sevens my parents’ friend Bunny had passed along from her grown up sons’ collection.

Everyone is Lying to You by Jo Piazza - trad wife thriller. Terrific. Now eager to read Techbitch

Her Beautiful Life by Brianna Labuskeses - another trad wife thriller, not quite as terrific but I still really enjoyed.

And then polished off:

Holly Seddon's Try Not to BreatheHolly Seddon’s Try Not to Breathe (I’m now halfway through her Don't Close Your Eyes)

I’ve started Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash because everyone’s been telling me to for ages and I now find myself in the right mood (maybe it’s just the Easter connection in the title and I’m about to come a cropper – we’ll see)

And I’ve started No Body No Crime (no comma either, apparently, which is paining me but maybe I will mentally swap it with the extraneous one in Harry Styles’ Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally album and be able to sleep at night once again) by Tess Sharpe and am enjoying that hugely.

As for buying – well, here’s what I have acquired since the start of the Easter holidays, also known as Why I Need to Move to a Bigger House Again.

The Bourne, Sharpe and Blake were from a new discovery - Norfolk’s only mobile bookshop, The Heartbound Van, which is a big van lined with new and secondhand books in Billy bookcases and will be at North Creake Farmers’ Market May 2 and doubtless elsewhere before that, what with being mobile ‘n’ everything. New bookshop, basically - hurrah!

Happy Easter, and happy reading!

Love, Lucy

My new book is available here

(More overflow shelving. And I still haven’t worked out how to do captions)

I’m sorry this edition of The Bookwormery is a bit late – such a dereliction of duty so early in the endeavour and my CHAGRIN is ABUNDANT. My excuse is that I have been out on manoeuvres. I went to Tiverton – exactly here, to be precise – to do the first of a few book events this year for the paperback publication of Bookish.

It was wonderful. Not least because as I arrived, the owner Tara Fraser (on here as @TaraFraser and Instagram as @tarafraserwrites) grabbed me, flung my backpack in the vague direction of the front door and propelled me off into the grounds saying “You have to come! There’s a secret garden!” Which, frankly, is how I wish to be greeted at all new venues from now on.

And do you know what? There was! The ivy has been cleared off some of the (gorgeous, red brick, lightly crumbling) walls now but when they arrived the wooden door to a sort of miniature valley had been firmly hidden therein. You go in and gaze past ancient pear trees and down onto vegetable beds and archways and tumbling and climbing plants of all kinds that I might, later in the year when they will be in bloom be able to recognise but for now can only say were definitely excellent secret gardeny-plants and, Tara swears, do play host to a bright-eyed robin, as decreed.

There was no sign of Dickon, but the sight of a proto-sex god when I was already in such a state of high excitement would have been too much so his absence was probably all to the good. I forgot to ask if there was a hollow tree trunk to roast eggs in too, but I bet there is.

Then came the event and all I can say is thank you so much for coming if you did, and I hope you had as good a time as I did.

Because you never can tell how these things are going to go. It’s the same with any kind of performance, of course (and talking about your book is a small kind of performance – it has to be. You can’t ask people to come and watch you sit unwashed in front of a laptop for four days or cry under a blanket on the sofa, or any of the other things that would be a truer representation of the artistic experience. It would not be fair and by the end of the four days I think you’d also be in breach of some pretty serious health and safety requirements). You can (I do) prepare and put your best foot forward but after that, it’s essentially alchemical. The audience gels with you – and kinda with itself too – to a greater or lesser degree, and generally you can count on a solid hour of fun but sometimes, despite everyone’s best efforts, things fall a bit flat. Or, at the other end of the scale – as at Tiverton, unless I’ve baaaaadly misjudged the situation – it really takes flight and you can be buzzing from it for hours if not days afterwards.

It’s a bit like reading itself, I suppose. If you’ve chosen a book with any kind of intent, you are pretty much guaranteed a good time. But sometimes it is just a good enough time. And sometimes it is the best time you’ve had in months with a story and you go round telling everyone how brilliant it, and reading, and life are and how stars are God’s daisy chain until someone quite rightly tells you to put a sock in it and you recollect yourself.

But! The great thing about having your own weekly newsletter in the modern age of democratised dispersal and hoojikumflip is that you can publish your enthusiasms and recollect yourself only at leisure – so here, without further ado, is my week in books

The Week in Books (told you)

After Tiverton I went to stay with my sister for the weekend. She lives in Dorset and because she loves me very much and because I promised not to come and stay with her for at least another year she took me to Bridport, home of not just a Waterstone’s and an indie absolutely overflowing with choices (The Book Shop Bridport – Independent Book Shop in Bridport) - both of whom let me sign the copies of Bookish that they had in stock, for which, many thanks - but two secondhand ones too. There is Bridport Old Books at 11 South Street, just across the road (I think – it’s a bit of a happy blur to me, to be honest) from The Book Shop and from the other secondhand emporium Wild & Homeless Books – a bespoke vintage retail experience (secondhand bookshop). BOB is a beautiful, spotless, carefully-curated place and W&H is your more traditional dig-in-and-get-your-hands-dirty kind of place. I’m happy with and in either, but because my sister was with me and is liable to start evacuating any premises she deems too chaotic, I largely skimmed the latter. But in BOB I bought a lovely hardback edition of The Gentle Falcon by Hilda Lewis, because even though I’m pretty sure I have a paperback copy somewhere and I really do try and save my money for things that are not simply upgrades, I just fell in love. It’s the story (aimed at children, but in the days when children were cleverer than modern adults or at least knew a shedload more basic history, on which authors were then free to build complex narrative edifices) of Queen Isabella, Richard II’s child bride, told from the perspective of one of her almost equally young ladies in waiting. I’ve only just started it, but I’m loving it.

(Look how beautiful! I had to, no?)

Which of course means, I’m afraid, that although I already have a number of Lewis’s historical novels for adults I cannot possibly contemplate reading them until I have acquired and consumed her other two for children: Harold Was My King (Godwinson) and Here Comes Harry (set in 15^th century London and who knows who that can be about). Unfortunately, the latter does not seem to be for sale from any of my usual suppliers and the former is at least £35 secondhand…or £2.99 on Kindle. So. Hard decisions need to be made in the House of Mangan, that’s for sure.

I also bought I Chose Caviar by Art Buchwald because although I have never read any Art Buchwald and do not think I even own any Art Buchwald and don’t think I know anything about Art Buchwald, he somehow nevertheless falls into the rough mental category for me that contains Leo Rosten, Herman J Mackiewicz (and therefore is affiliated too with Dorothy Parker et al). I could be absolutely showing my arse here, but that is why I bought it and so let it stand and you can laugh at my ignorance in the comments, no problem.

In The Book Shop I bought Call Me Ishmaelle by Xiaolu Guo and David Szalay’s Flesh because – well, because I’ve read all the reviews and my interest is piqued and my reading glands are juicing. Sometimes my reasoning is so simple it barely amounts to reasoning at all.

And then as we passed through the Saturday market on our way home, there was one of those fantastic stalls that sells nothing but thrillers, crime novels and romances, divided into authors and plastic crates and of course it was necessary to pick up a Harlen Coben I have not (I don’t think) yet read – The Match – for £2. See non-reasoning, above.

Then when we did get home, I ordered - unstoppable now, you see - Woman Alive by Susan Ertz from Manderley Press because it is a 1933 dystopian tale about the last woman in London left alive after a poisonous gas wipes out the rest and you know what, I’m only human.

A deeply pleasing spree. I also bought what may turn out to be the world’s greatest pen, but if I start getting onto stationery now we’ll be here all week. And I must stop, because tomorrow is March 31 when I am supposed to hand in 25,000 words of the first draft of my novel. I have written 18,500. This is my way of telling my agents. So if I’m not here next week, you know why.

Happy reading!

Love, Lucy

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