18 bibliomemoirs to gift your favourite bookworms this Christmas

I don’t read nearly as much non-fiction as I do fiction, but one thing I can’t resist is a bibliomemoir.

A bibliomemoir is a memoir about books, reading, and the author’s connection with the literary world.

They are my favourite form of non-fiction and if they’re on audio? Devoured. Usually in a day. I cannot get enough of them.

Bookworms writing about books and authors - there’s just nothing like it. They’re the absolute perfect gift for your favourite readers.

Now, I have read every single bibliomemoir on the graphic above. Every single one. So I now feel like a self-diagnosed bibliomemoir expert and so I’m going to break down the different types of bibliomemoir for you like a professional.

The Diary

The owner of The Bookshop in Wigtown, Shaun Bythell, has written a trilogy of diaries of running his Scottish bookshop and I adore them. ‘The Diary of a Bookseller’, ‘Confessions of a Bookseller’ and ‘Remainders of the Day’ detail a year in Bythell’s life running a bookshop in Scotland booktown, detailing his sales, his profits, and the…interesting characters that visit The Bookshop.

The diaries of Susan Hill: ‘Jacob’s Room is Full of Books’ and ‘Howard’s End is on the Landing’ are also a year in Hill’s reading life, but they detail a year in her reading life. The books she discovers and rediscovers, what she reads and rereads, and the shape of her year around books and reading. I really, really wish she’d write some more.

The Author Love-In

These ones feel particularly special because it’s reassuring that other people obsess as deeply over authors that have been dead for 100s of years as I do. Samantha Ellis’s ‘How to Be a Heroine’ was my first ever bibliomemoir and it set off a reading love affair for me. IN this book she revists the books and authors that she loved as a child and teenager, exploring her reaction to them as an adult. It’s wonderful.

‘Mrs Gaskell and Me’ by Nell Stevens (‘The Victorian and the Romantic’ in the US) details parallel stories of Elizabeth Gaskell and her time in Rome where she fell in love, and Stevens’ exploration of that period in Gaskell’s life for her dissertation while her own love life explodes around her. The connections and parallels are so satisfying and so is the glimpse at academia.

I wasn’t sure at first if ‘The Anna Karenina Fix’ by Viv Groskop would hit the same spot, but this journey through Russian classics and looks for the answers to life’s big questions. I actually read this after reading ‘Anna Karenina’ and ‘War and Peace’ which just gave it that extra spark, and a touch of smugness too…

The Booksellers

Technically, Shaun Bythell’s books fit into this category too, but these diaries are explicitly about being a bookseller and so I’m smudging my own rules and putting them right here.

Author and former bookseller Jen Campbell wrote ‘The Bookshop Book’ about the special, wild, wonderful and unique bookstores around the world, and created me a bucklist with it. From ‘Libreria Acqua Alta’ in Venice (it’s magnificent fyi) to the Book Barge which moors on the Thames, Campbell explores these pockets of joy all over the world.

The only bibliomemoir I’ve ever read that I didn’t fall in love with is ‘The Bookseller’s Tale’ by Martin Latham which is the story of his love affair with books, the weirdness of bookselling and a bit of a cultural history of both. For me, the cultural history element took over a little.

The Memoir

‘Bookworm’ by Lucy Mangan is a classic memoir, but of a person, life and career shaped by books and literature. She takes us through her life and the books, characters and authors that we by her side at each major point in her life. It’s the most memoir of the bibliomemoirs.

One of the first bibliomemoirs I read was ‘The Year of Reading Dangerously’ by Andy Miller and I remember listening to the audiobook all in one day. This is Miller’s journey back into reading and taking time for himself during a period of busyness and tiredness, and how fifty books changed and saved his life.

Have you discovered bibliomemoir yet? Do you have any favourites?

Written by Sophie