The Uncommon Reader

By -
The Uncommon Reader, by Alan Bennett

Queen Elizabeth II has never been all that much of a reader; reading, after all,
was a hobby and it was in the nature of her job that she didn't have hobbies.  Jogging, growing roses, chess or rock climbing, cake decoration, model aeroplanes.  No. Hobbies involved preferences and preferences had to be avoided; preferences excluded people.  One had no preferences.  Her job was to take an interest, not to be interested herself.
But one day, chasing the corgis, she runs into a mobile library and feels that she ought to check a book out, to be polite.  One book leads to another, and soon books are more alluring than royal duties--to the exasperation of prime ministers, equerries, and other palace personnel.

This was a fun little novella.  Alan Bennett draws a fictional and fanciful portrait of the queen, but uses that to explore how literature connects us to others.  In his story, the Queen is kind of the ultimate disconnected person--so wrapped around with duty and so distant from everyone else that books, once discovered, have a drastic effect on her personality. 


Comments

  1. CleoDecember 4, 2013 at 9:33 AM

    This looks fun! I sometimes cringe when authors use real (and beloved) characters, but if it's done well, it can be a delightful read. I have 10 days off after Christmas so this may be the perfect book to choose for a day when I want to curl up with a hot cup of tea and silence. :-)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more