Bookworm by Lucy Mangan

[TheOnlyLivingBoyInNewCross]

I’m reading this and have just got to the moment which mentions the need for a Ladybird book on Maintaining Your Sanity on Mumsnet Given the Impossibility of Staying Away from Mumsnet.

Lucy: If you are on here, your book is JOYOUS. We have a LOT of childhood reading in common!

OK, I still don't know what you mean by this.

I have used the Kindle 'highlight and report' function to report a factual error in the words "On her first visit", maybe if we all do it, the next edition will correct this to "On one visit" and honour will be satisfied 😁

My copy of Bookworm has the first 38 pages and all the cover/intro/copyright pages printed twice. That was far more jarring than any factual inaccuracies.
Picture of p38 open beside the restart.

That’s a printing/binding error. Nothing to do with the author.

You’re are right, @MoistVonL - Bookworm is a memoir, not an academic treatise.

That’s a pretty unpleasant and unnecessary thing to infer @CurlewKate.

I think some people on this thread should either give up reading for pleasure or go and start their own publishing company and let the rest of us know how they get on.

@Ddakji I’m not sure you meant to tag CurlewKate, she’s an enthusiast for the book!

You’re right, @SheilaFentiman - apologies @CurlewKate! it was your quote of @mylovedoesitgood’s unpleasant take that I had looked at.

Unpleasant? That’s subjective. In any case, I have a differing point of view, and it’s OK to voice that, within reason. Are you new to online forums?

It’s not you know. It’s a single word. If ‘first’ were corrected to ‘third’, there would be no error.

A point of view based on what? A mistake in a book?

What exactly did you mean by implying she wasn’t “genuine”? Can you explain further?

@ImaginedCorners , it's not what needs correcting.
Stop poking me.

Some posters appear to think LM is pretending to have been a voracious childhood reader for the purposes of selling a book, when in fact she’s skimmed the Spark Notes guide to children’s writing, and her error about which visit Lucy met Aslan on is a ‘Gotcha!’ which proves she has not only not read TLTWATW, but probably hasn’t read anything much, ever.

I mean, I don’t get it either.

But I’m always interested in my own mistakes and misrememberings, and strange automatic pilot moments. I once, in an essay for a major peer-reviewed journal got past two editors, the main editor and a copy-editor with a reference to ‘James Joyce’s highly sexual letters to Lucia’ (Lucia was Joyce’s daughter — the letters were written to his partner/wife Nora!) I knew this perfectly well, but not only did I write it and reread and revise it multiple times without registering the mistake, so did two well-known Joyce scholars, clearly equally on automatic pilot. I noticed it myself, in horror, at final proof stage.

And realised later on that I had a copy of a book about Lucia Joyce on my desk beside my PC, so probably jist absorbed it from there.

But an essay in a peer-reviewed journal almost went to press, incredibly, with the completely baseless claim that Joyce sent sex letters to his daughter.

‘Poking’? You addressed me by name above. Does that also constitute ‘poking’?

Having thought about it, maybe I was being unfair to Lucy M. Memory can work in unexpected ways after all, especially when it's a recollection of something you experienced (or read) many decades ago. So it's unfair to suggest that she might not have read all the books mentioned.

However I still think it was a bit lazy of her not to check her facts before submitting her manuscript or whatever writers do.

I wrote something recently about The Archers. I got Lawrence and Leonard mixed up. Any Archer’s fans will know what a heinous error that was.!

Some posters appear to think LM is pretending to have been a voracious childhood reader for the purposes of selling a book, when in fact she’s skimmed the Spark Notes guide to children’s writing, and her error about which visit Lucy met Aslan on is a ‘Gotcha!’ which proves she has not only not read TLTWATW, but probably hasn’t read anything much, ever.

I said it’s a possibility she lied. Also, I never said she wasn’t a voracious reader.

I would have read it and thought it was a slip up and it was meant to say a talking faun called Mr Tumnus. Don't think it would have given me the rage

The quote referenced 'some posters' - including but not only you @mylovedoesitgood .

One poster said: The whole premise and indeed title is that she is a Bookworm. Inaccuracy, in my opinion, and only my opinion, brings that into doubt.
With the implication being that LM wasn't a bookworm.

Another poster said: And yes- made me wonder if the rest of Mangan's book was genuine.
And another said: but you do question how much of a devoted reader she really was. And then that leads you to question everything else in her book, what a shame.
Both of which imply lies or pretence.

Anyway! I have truly said all I can say, I'm off to read the damn thing now :>

I seem to have opened a can of worms!
Bottom line is I was really enjoying the book up until that point. As I said earlier TLTWATW was such a huge favourite of mine as a child that it really touched a nerve and yes it did ruin the book.
Reading is subjective and, no, I don’t find it hard to ‘read anything’ as a previous poster suggested. In fact I read a lot, probably some of those have errors in but pass me by because I don’t have the required knowledge.
But when an error is obvious it does annoy me. Each of us have our reading red flags and this is one of mine. If other people don’t feel the same way that’s fine.

I have enjoyed Lucy Mangan’s books, but I (and others on MN) noticed that she also made a mistake in her latest one Bookish. She called the old man in the Adrian Mole books Bert Digweed instead of Bert Baxter.

Now, that IS unforgivable.

I think everyone's misreading that quote out of context. It's discussing how children don't spot the Christian allegories in Narnia on the first go. In that context it's perfectly acceptable to say 'she meets a talking lion who fills her with love', so the focus has to be on Aslan because he is the relevant bit, and Mr Tumnus and the beavers are by the by. And I think it is Lucy Pevensie's first visit if you read the whole of TLTWATW as one continuous visit, which I think is a valid reading because there's no time jump when they nip back home in the intervals.

Nope, don’t buy it. Look at the whole sentence.

On her first visit, Lucy meets a talking lion called Aslan who fills her heart with love and she promises that she will return to help him"

For me, a mistake in a published book isn't a dealbreaker. To err is human as Seneca said. Or in the words of Horace, 'Sometimes even good Homer nods.' @ImaginedCorners 's anecdote reminds me that I've seen far worse errors in published, peer-reviewed academic articles. In the worst cases, I raise my eyebrows and think the author and editors should have done their research better, but most of the time, the errors are trivial and clearly just a momentary mental lapse.

Even the error I spotted in Bookish about the Inklings didn't worry me much; I just thought, hmm, so the Inklings aren't her specialty then. If you want to see a truly awful error, then take the famous instance where Naomi Wolf misunderstood the legal term 'death recorded' and used it to form the incorrect premise of an entire book. THAT was an indicator of shoddy scholarship and multiple people should have been embarrassed about it, including the academics who examined the Oxford DPhil the book was based on. But Lucy Mangan getting mixed up about Narnia visits? I can see how it would be irksome for loyal Narnia fans, but I don't think it undermines her integrity. She has demonstrably read many, many books, and she's misremembered a couple of details.

The whole point of Bookworm and Bookish is that we should read for joy and comfort, and I interpreted the books themselves in that spirit.

Then again, there is no pedant like a reader who knows a book well and hears someone else say something WRONG about it. The horror! 😂

She needs to change lion for fawn and then that makes sense.