The yearning, wondrous magic of childhood reading

Bookworm by Lucy Mangan x Sancerre

I start reading Bookworm in my childhood bedroom, unaware of how perfect the setting is.

All around me lies the backdrop of my imagination – the library that raised me – and by the end of the first chapter, I’d laughed and wept and texted three of my friends to find out if they’d read Lucy Mangan’s bookish memoir.

There’s so much to love about Bookworm.  

Told with a reflective, self-deprecating humour, it’s the story of growing up via books, of learning what we like through words, discovering crushes in the form of characters (oh Dickon, you dark-horse), not to mention how reading can make us who we are.

Plus, despite being a memoir, it’s so much more than just a potted history of what Mangan did or didn’t enjoy reading whilst growing up.

Mangan explores each book and their context, re-examining them from the perspective of an adult and parent. This leads to some deftly examined and insightful literary criticism as well as some fairly entertaining revelations. An early example of this is her exploration of children’s illustrators – their influencers and legacy. Until now, my understanding of classic children’s illustration was simply Beatrix Potter, Quentin Blake, and various other books about anthropomorphised woodland creatures – so to learn about Greenaway, Caldecott, Sendak, Shepard, and Kerr (among many many others) was thrilling. On the other hand, discovering that Barbar contains dubious colonialist messages nearly made me spit out my wine (my parents determinedly hung Barbar posters on my wall for most of my childhood).

Bookworm also maps a journey you can’t help but compare to your own. The parent who instilled you with a love of reading. The books that made you feel awe and excitement. The books that scared or shocked you.

Recollections of how Mangan’s father gave her books, reminded me of my own dad reading me adventure stories – most set at sea – such Swallows and Amazons, the Green Sailors, and Moonfleet.

Mangan gravitated to stories that fit into her own, quiet, lovely life – joyfully finding ‘predictable, familiar, and safe world[s]’ in Enid Blyton, Louisa May Alcott, the Shoe books, all the way through to Judy Bloom. She liked the idea of other people having adventures, so that she didn’t have to. In a similar way, I fell in love with the whimsical, adventurous, mind-bending and absurd. Writers like Milne and Dahl were the tip of a very big iceberg, and I longed to be as daring, brilliant, and defiant as my favourite characters - and still do when I think of Miryem Mandelstam, Nina Zenik, or Anne-with-an-E.

Because of the way it encourages you to travel through your own novel upbringing, Bookworm is incredibly thought-provoking in a somewhat bitter-sweet, heart-warming, and heart-breaking way.

Because from the first page, Bookworm took me back to nights spent hiding beneath bedcovers, using torch light to crack through the next chapter (or four or five or ten). They make me recall my mum’s irritation at having to come upstairs to find me for lunch because I’d fallen too deep into a book to hear anyone calling. I can laugh now at how I carried books to parties too – just in case I could slip away for ten minutes. To this day I count characters amongst my oldest friends: Alan Beckett and David Balfour, Matilda Wormwood, Bonnie and Sylvia, John Trenchard, Hermione Granger, Titty Walker, Roald Dahl’s Red Riding Hood – these were people I aspired to be, longed to play with, loved to imagine, made up my own stories about, and who left me with a life-long addiction to the literary.

Mangan conjures up that sense of wonder – the yearning magic – of childhood reading. It’s like receiving a very good, golden dream from the BFI’s trumpet. It’s a feeling I didn’t realise I missed. That sense that anything is possible.

Surrounded by my thirty-odd-year library, it made me question when I stopped double-checking the back of wardrobes? When did I stop peeking through curtains at witching hour, half dreading the idea of spotting a giant? When did the sandy dunes of Poole Harbour stop being my very own Kirrin Island? My eleventh birthday (when I did not receive an owl) was one of the most disappointing of my life – was it then?

Bookworm filled me with such nostalgia, I began to question whether books had lost a little of their enchantment as I’ve grown older. But fortunately, I don’t think that’s true - and I don’t think that’s the message Mangan is trying to get across either.

Bookworm highlights just how open and receptive we are as kids. We let ourselves believe in magic. We hold onto impossibilities. We’re allowed to travel anywhere, be anyone, live a thousand lives. Mangan illustrates how childhood readers find the spaces into which they can pour their hopes and dreams like water.

It also shows that we don’t lose the wonder just because we grow up. Why do we feel nostalgic? Because whether it’s a comforting, cosy booknook reads or whirligig thought experiments in dystopian fantasy, our books are lifeboats on bad days, gemstones on dull days, companions whilst traveling, dependable friends and inspiring brainteasers. They teach us to make sense of the world as kids and keep coaxing us through as adults.

Warm, charming and entirely relatable, Bookworm is – as you might expect – the perfect book for the bookish.

It is also a gentle reminder that the magic we experienced as children really isn’t that far away.

The Pairing: La Cave d’Augustin Florent, Sancerre (Sauvignon Blanc)

Sancerre is a fantastic wine. One of the best.

I also think of it as my gateway to wine. There is a very clear line between before and after my first sip of Sancerre. Before, I’d always been a bit ambivalent about what my dad was serving with Sunday lunch, but one summer’s evening he introduced me to a (very nice, moderately aged) Sancerre and the world changed. It taste like buttered sunshine, delicious with depth but still crisp, dry and oh so fresh. Perhaps I’m romanticising, but that’s why I feel like this is the best fit for Bookworm. It’s a wine that takes me back and which pairs on every level, including those remembered.

In that sense, this week’s pairing was an easy one - but let’s dig into it a bit more.

The Wine: Sancerre is located at the very eastern edge of the Loire Valley’s main vineyard area - closer to Chablis in Burgandy than some of the other famous Loire vineyards. Like many of the wines that I love, the soil type is a point of pride for Sancerre growers too - most terroirs are either chalk, limestone-gravel or silex (flint). The latter is often given credit for ‘the distinctive, smoky pierre à fusil (gunflint) aroma’ found in some of the sauvignon grapes here. It definitely creates a distictive aroma that’s hard to miss - and whilst you may still catch the telltale gooseberry of other sauv blancs, that minerality is what makes the Sancerre shine.

Tasting Notes: Traditional white Sancerre is typically aromatic, full of grassy flavours, citrus notes, and some clear flinty-smoky minerality. And this wine from Augustin Floret isn’t going to disappoint. As a fairly young wine, it’s not as deep and complex as you’ll find in older Sancerre’s but it’s a fresh style - citrus, pear and green apple on the nose, a light body and a soft, minerally finish that doesn’t linger too long. Easy drinking - almost the kind that’s nostalgic for a bigger, bolder version of itself - but delicious all the same.

Where can I buy it: This wine I actually got from my partner - he went to France for work and brought it back with him. You can also go to less extreme measures to find your Sancerre - big supermarkets - Waitrose, Tesco etc - should stock it, as well as Majestic. For the specific bottle, you now have a great excuse to go to Paris!

Fun facts: Less a fun fact but I loved reading up on the history of Sancerre and found this bit of knowledge from Wine Folly absolutely fascinating… who knew that Sancerre was such a strategic little spot of land. “Situated almost precisely in the middle of the country, and perhaps because of this, Sancerre has been a center of French resistance since the Middle Ages. Huguenots retreated to it during the wars of religion and the Protestant reformation. Again, during the French revolution, the village was a center of the royalist rebellion to restore the French monarchy. During World War II, Sancerre was a regional command center for the French resistance. After all of this, we can conclude that Sancerre takes “being French” very seriously.”

ps. We’re sending this on Thursday this week as we adopted a kitten on Tuesday and you can only imagine the chaos its caused in our little house (of the best kind). She’s a wonderful distraction and incredibly sweet. So here you go, meet Pinot - the latest addition to The Book Cellar family and apparently as fond of a good shelfie as the rest of us.