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Hello and welcome to The Spectators Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of the Spectator. My guest this week is the writer Lucy Mangon, who published a best-selling memoir

of her childhood reading called Bookworm a few years ago

and has now followed it up with a story that takes her reading life out of harbour and into the adult world

in bookish how reading shapes our lives. Lacey, welcome. Can you start by telling me a bit about

how you feel the vibe of this book is different from bookworm?

What did you discover in the course of looking at, as it were, adolescent and young adult and older adult reading?

I think it brought home to me just, you know, how rubbish much of adult life is compared to childhood,

if you've had a happy childhood, which I was

lucky enough to have, because when you're remembering the sort of full, not full body

immersion, but full mind immersion of childhood reading, and you compare it to what happens

over succeeding years, you remember those kind of halcy and glory days with increasing fondness,

which is not to say that reading takes on any less importance, because it certainly doesn't,

but the experience of reading becomes something you have to fit around, you know, ghastly

responsibilities of adult life and parenting and all the rest of it, all the other mistakes

you've made.

And you realize, you know, because like anything, if reading's a constant, you realize

how much has changed around that in your life, inevitably.

And, yeah, as ever, there's this sort of relatively little good to be said about adulthood.

...