During lockdown, the writer and journalist Lucy Mangan decided to build a shed in her garden that would work both as her office and as a shrine to her book collection, the belated realisation of a long-held dream. Mangan suffers from tsundoku, a Japanese term that may well have been coined simply to torment Marie Kondo: buying books at a rate that outstrips the speed at which you can read them, and keeping them all. Mangan has 10,000. Filling the very many shelves, as she recounts in this memoir, took her ages. She enjoyed every rapturous moment.
“I am never happier than when I am in a bookshop,” she writes, and so of course she creates one for herself. Only reluctantly does she leave its four walls. When not reviewing television shows for the Guardian – even bibliophiles need day jobs – she’s in her customised womb, reading. “If we stop reading, we stop putting ourselves in other people’s shoes,” she writes. “We cut ourselves off from avenues of growth, exploration and adventure.”
