Bookish (2025) - Lucy Mangan

 

Lucy Mangan’s Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives is Mangan's follow-up to 2018’s Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading, which covers the author’s childhood reading influences and experiences. Bookish picks up with Mangan’s teenage reading years and concludes in what the author calls her middle-age ones (she is 52). 

“If we stop reading, if we stop putting ourselves in other people’s shoes, if we stop considering their situations, relationships, reactions, choices and morals, if we stop exercising ourselves imaginatively, if we stop asking ourselves, ‘What if…?’ and ‘What would I …?’, then we cut ourselves off from inward avenues of growth, exploration, adventure."

 Lucy Mangan is a dedicated reader whose relationship with books goes far deeper than all but the most dedicated of readers can imagine, so Bookish is as much a love letter to books, authors, bookstores, libraries, and publishers as it is a memoir. I get the impression that when Mangan is not reading, she’s thinking about reading as she anxiously makes her way through the day’s assigned tasks. 

It is not surprising that Mangan depended heavily upon her reading to prepare and guide her through the stages of adulthood: falling in love and finding a life partner, beginning a career, motherhood, and the ultimate grief that accompanies so much of anyone's lifetime. In addition, the book explores topics such as “formative novels,” genre fiction, “reading the canon,” dystopias, “studying the classics,” guilty pleasures, romance novels, crime fiction, and creating "a library of one’s own.” 

My own favorite chapter of Bookish is its tenth, entitled: “A Library of Ones Own: Curating a Book Collection.” It is great fun to experience Mangan’s joy and “all is right with the world” feeling as she turns a small outbuilding behind the family’s second home into a personal library and hideaway all her own. The amount of physical labor involved in sorting and shelving 10,000 books, much less all the labor that preceded the shelving, was staggering, but I can easily imagine the grin on Mangan’s face as she worked and envisioned what the finished space would become. 

But even the most avowed of book collectors, sooner or later, has to face the fact that enough is enough, and that there will never be enough space to keep every book that comes into their lives. So with a goal of culling at least five percent of the books she moved to her new library, Mangan approaches the purge this way:

“So the great culling of my mid-forties began. It was a long job and it couldn’t be subcontracted out, because the decisions could only be taken by one individual- me, hi! - one individual book at a time…I held each book in my hand and wordlessly communicated with it…If we still had something to say to each other, if we still had a connection, the book stayed. If there was silence, I thanked it for its service, wondered who the killer had turned out to be after all and pitched it into the charity box."

 If the above paragraph is a little bit like an arrow to your heart, Bookish is for you. You will get Lucy Mangan and consider her a kindred spirit, a friend you haven’t met yet. 

Future Boy (2025) - Michael J. Fox & Nelle Fortenberry

 Michael J. Fox was only 23 years old in 1985 when he pulled off one of the craziest Hollywood stunts of all time. For about three months, beginning on January 15, 1985, Fox worked simultaneously on two major projects: completing the third season of Family Ties during the day while shooting his scenes in the first Back to the Future movie at night. He managed this by working five days a week from roughly 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Family Ties before being hustled over to the movie set for several more hours of work. It didn’t hurt that Michael was only 23 years old and fearless.  

In Future Boy, Michael tells us how he managed to pull it off.

Michael J. Fox (the “J” was added to his name because another Michael Fox was already registered with the Screen Actors Guild) caught the acting bug in Canada during junior high school, and by age 15 he had landed a major role in a Canadian sitcom called Leo and Me. By age 18, he had dropped out of school for good and moved south to the U.S. with about $3,000 in his pocket. Michael was not exactly an overnight success although he did manage to pick up guest shots on a few television shows like Lou Grant and Palmerstown U.S.A. 

But still, a few years later Fox was near penniless, had sold his furniture to buy food, and even sometimes used dumpster diving as a way to find free food. He finally caught his big break with Family Ties, but memories of those early days were still fresh enough that Fox was determined to take advantage of every opportunity that presented itself. So, feeling young and invincible, he jumped with both feet into the work schedule that would ultimately turn him into a superstar. 

And he did it.

Future Boy is particular fun for fans of  Back to the Future or Family Ties, but even those who only know Fox because of his more recent pubic struggles with Parkinson’s will respond to the actor’s likable and heartfelt approach to the memoir. Reading Future Boy is akin to sitting across the table from Fox while he tells you stories about those three months - and that he uses an often-humorous, self-deprecating approach to his casual storytelling makes it all the better. In addition to Fox’s stories, the memoir includes some fresh interviews with cast and crew members, including an account of Fox’s remarkable relationship with Eric Stoltz, the actor he replaced in the role of Marty McFly after Stoltz had already completed five or six weeks work in the role. 

Michael J. Fox is an easy guy to pull for, and this glimpse into his behind the scenes life makes for fun reading. Now, though, I wish he would give us a similar look at how he has managed to deal with Parkinson’s for the last thirty-five years. 

Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox (11-19-22)

What I’m Reading This Week (6-8-26)

 During the past two weeks (since I’ve done one of these “what I’m reading” posts), I’ve finished up four very different books:

• The Things We Never Say - Elizabeth Strout’s latest literary novel,
• Future Boy - Michael J. Fox’s memoir about working simultaneously on the third season of Family Ties and the first Back to the Future movie,
• Bookish - Lucy Mangan’s account of her evolution as a reader from childhood to middle age, and
• A Rip Through Time- Kelly Armstrong’s time travel novel about a young female Canadian detective who gets trapped inside the body of an 1850s Scottish woman who almost became the victim of a serial killer. 

I enjoyed each of the four to one degree or another, but I’m still looking for what will be only my third five-star book of 2026. Either I’m grading harder than ever this year or I’ve been unlucky in my choices. Either way, the search goes on.

I’m at various stages of completion in Chernow’s Mark Twain, McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail. The only possible five-star book I see there is Mark Twain, but the jury is still out on that one. I have, in the meantime, started a few others:

John D. MacDonald is an author I loved reading in my late teens and early twenties, but I don’t think I’ve read him since. And it’s been so long ago now, that even if I accidentally re-read something of his, there’s almost no chance that I’ll even notice it. A Purple Place for Dying has already been an eye-opener in the sense that Travis McGee, MacDonald’s fictional P.I., is so blatantly sexist a character. I hadn’t realized just how different the ‘60s were from today in that way. 

The Dying Light, the fourth book in Ann Cleeves’s Detective Matthew Venn series, will be published at the end of September. I’ve read the first three books in the series - and I’m a longtime fan of Ann Cleeves - so I have high hopes for this one. It certainly gets off to a rousing start as the first chapter opens with the discovery of the drowned body of a 17-year old girl at the summer home of her missing friend.

I first read this Jules Verne classic when I was 13 or 14 years old, so I imagine that this reading will impress me a lot differently than that first reading did. Back then, it was all about the adventure. This time around, in this George Makepeace Towle translation, I’m most enjoying the humor and the characters themselves as Fogg and Passepartout scurry around the world with Detective Fix in constant pursuit. I have vague memories of seeing a movie version of Around the World in 80 Days during my childhood, too, something else I want to look into further. 

I fell in love with Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s four-book The Cemetery of Forgotten Books series a few years ago, but I’ve never read any of his short stories. The City of Mist is a collection of ten of those stories, and they all sound very similar in theme and tone to the novels, so I’m anxious to get to them. I’m kind of afraid that I’ll be re-reading all four novels if these stories turn out to be as good as I suspect they are.

We read Animal Farm in junior high school, as I recall, and I remember being fascinated by it, especially once I figured out what Orwell was actually doing here. The teacher didn’t do a lot of prep work, allowing us instead to read the book on our own for most of the first week. It was fun to see the “light bulbs” turning on one by one around the classroom as the week came to a close. Then, the real fun began.

I’m especially looking forward to finishing Blood Meridian this week. I can’t remember when I’ve worked as hard understanding a novel as I have on this one - probably when I finally managed to read all of Moby Dick a few years ago. It’s really been a chore, and I’m wondering why I’m not reacting to Blood Meridian the way all the critics keep telling me I should be reacting. 

Have a great week, everyone.

The Things We Never Say (2026) - Elizabeth Strout

 

The Things We Never Say is Elizabeth Strout’s first standalone novel since The Burgess Boys was published in 2013. Going back to 1998, the year in which her first novel was published, this is Stout's eleventh novel overall, and just her fourth standalone.

“For Artie it was as though he had lived these many years looking at things from one angle, and now it was as though someone had turned him partly in a different direction and everything - everything - looked different."

Artie Dam is the kind of high school history teacher who is remembered by former students for decades. Artie has everything going for him. On the surface at least, Artie has settled down into the kind of steady life that others can only aspire to. He’s been married to the same woman for decades, loves his teaching job and his students, has a grown son who seems to be doing well, and is often found solo-sailing his own boat out on the bay near his home. 

But Artie Dam, surrounded by friends and family though he might be, is a deeply lonely man who feels that he really doesn’t know even the people closest to him, and truth be known, Artie even feels a little bit suicidal at times. Then even that uncomfortable world gets turned upside down on Artie after he learns a deeply buried family secret that further convinces him that no one ever really knows anyone else. The final straw for Artie comes with the 2024 election. He dreads the election as it approaches, and when it’s over he’s left with the feeling that everything familiar to him is slipping away.

In the end, Artie figures out that being alive is a “private thing” for all of us, that our real pains, truths, and thoughts are things that no one else will ever fully be able to understand or even have access to. This is a novel about loneliness, communication, and connection, and Strout leaves the reader with a lot to think about despite how short, at only 220 pages, The Things We Never Say is. 

This is another beautifully written Elizabeth Strout novel, but it is not destined to be one of my favorites of hers mainly, I suppose, because the way that Artie and, with one exception, everyone around him reacts to the 2024 election does not feel realistic to me. I found it hard to believe how deeply obsessed and self-destructive the people in Artie’s life allowed themselves to become immediately upon announcement of the official results. For me, it feels a little heavy handed even as a literary device. That said, The Things We Never Say is an Elizabeth Strout novel, and Elizabeth Strout proved a long time ago that she is incapable of writing a bad novel.  

Abandoned Books - Jan thru May 2026

 I generally keep track of the books I’ve tossed aside, usually somewhere between 10 and 20 of them per year, just in case I might want to give them a second chance. During the first five months of 2026, I’ve abandoned seven books for one reason or another.

In the order of which I’ve abandoned them, these are the seven:

This is the first book I bought after acquiring my new Kobo Reader, and I really had high hopes for it since it was a National Book Award semi-finalist at one point. But I found Chain Gang All-Stars extremely difficult to read because its author decided to go all “pronoun crazy” on me. This is a “woke” book by any definition, but my only problem with it was tying to figure out if “they” and “them” were supposed to be singular or plural. The plot was interesting, but not interesting enough to keep me working so hard to figure out what easily could have been made obvious by simply using pronouns the way they were meant to be used. I got tired of re-reading whole paragraphs just to be sure that the author was only talking about one person instead of multiple ones.

I was looking for an Australian novel when I started reading A Hundred Small Lessons, and was drawn to this story about an elderly woman forced to leave her family for health reasons. Unfortunately/fortunately, the home she’s placed in is within walking distance of her old house, and she keeps coming back even though a young family has moved in. It’s probably me on this one, but it just became too much of a “Hallmark movie” to keep me turning pages…too predictable.

This one seemed like a natural fit for me, so I have now given its second, and final chance. Turns out that I don’t get much of a sense of the author’s “passion” from this collection of bookish essays he’s written over the years. Frankly, I found them to be very dryly written, and a little bit dull if read as a steady diet. I’m sure that many people have loved this one, and can tell me that I’m wrong about it. I’ll grant them that. Just not for me.  

I abandoned Every Day I Read for exactly the opposite reason that I quit on A Passion for Books. The South Korean author of this one took such an overwhelming cutesy approach here that I quickly realized I am not even remotely close to being part of her intended audience. I imagine this one got a big push on BookTock, exactly where its intended audience hangs out for a good time. For me, it was just too simplistic and obvious to get me past the book’s first few pages.

The Black Wolf is, by far, my biggest disappointment of the year. (Maybe it started with what I consider to be a pretty horrible cover.) I made it all the way through Penny’s 50-page recap of her previous book (barely), and then waded right in to her preachy anti-business, anti-American diatribe on global warming and Canadian sellouts willing to ruin Canada in order to enrich themselves. This one is a real downer of a story.

Rule of the Bone is my other big regret for 2026. I’ve had a copy of this one around the house for years, and this was my second attempt at reading it. I was surprised, or maybe not really all that surprised, I suppose, to end up quitting on it this second time around just a few pages past where I quit on it the first time I tried to read it. Russell Banks manages the near impossible here: a particularly repulsive storyline that still manages to be boring as heck.

I really didn’t get very far into this one. I will probably catch some flak for saying this, but I’ve grown weary about every book, movie, or television show being required for political correctness reasons to have at least one, or maybe a handful of LGBQT characters at the forefront. I’ve nothing against anyone’s personal life, not my business, but I think the group is overrepresented now to the point of ridiculousness - and, in the long run, that’s to the detriment of the very population being highlighted. Call it LGBQT fatigue, if you will. 

That’s it, so far. Looks like I’ll probably come in around 15 abandoned books again this year, right on schedule. How many do you guys give up on each year on average? I used to force myself, when I was much younger and had way more reading years still ahead of me than behind me, to finish every book that I began, but those days are long gone.

The Little Liar (2023) - Mitch Albom

I’m really not all that much into audiobooks these days, but I do still enjoy them anytime I’m driving alone for more than just a few minutes at a time. The extra focus that audiobooks demand keeps me more aware and alert than I otherwise would be by just listening to music while I drive. So I put Mitch Albom’s The Little Liar to good use last month. I chose an Albom book mainly because he is one of those writers whose stories are sraightforward enough that they don’t require a focus level that might be dangerous at 75 miles per hour. That he does such a wonderful job narrating The Little Liar himself was a bonus I didn’t expect.

Mitch Albom books tend to be a little gimmicky, and this one is no exception. This is a story about an eleven-year-old boy in Salonika, Greece, who has never in his life told a lie. We know this to be true because the book’s narrator is none other than Truth itself, and Truth tells us that young Nico Krispis is simply incapable of telling a lie. We, as readers, believe it - and so does everyone in Nico’s Salonika community.

But Nico’s determination never to lie backfires on him when the Nazis invade Greece and a devious German officer exploits Nico’s reputation for unfailing honesty to trick the boy’s fellow Jews into calmly boarding the trains that are to take them to faraway concentration camps. Nico believes that the families are being relocated to new towns and jobs where they can safely ride out the war, and that’s what they believe when he tells them it’s true. He’s believes what he’s been told by the German he’s befriended, and that’s what he tells everyone at the train station. It’s only when Salonika has largely been cleared of its Jewish population that Nico figures out the truth. And when he does, he is so horrified that he never tells the truth again.

There are four main characters in The Little Liar: Nico; his older brother Sebastian; Fannie, the little girl both boys are in love with; and the German officer. The four characters go their separate ways after leaving Salonika for the camps, but they are far from done with each other. Albom tells their stories in rotating segments focused on each's post-war life until the moment forty years later that they finally meet again for their final confrontation.   

The Little Liar is a story about lies, devastating guilt, reluctant forgiveness, self-forgiveness, and hard-earned redemption. It reads like a deceptively simple parable requiring a fairly strong suspension of disbelief at times, but it still manages to pack a surprising punch.