The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett

The Uncommon Reader is none other than HM the Queen who drifts accidentally into reading when her corgis stray into a mobile library parked at Buckingham Palace. She reads widely ( JR Ackerley, Jean Genet, Ivy Compton Burnett and the classics) and intelligently. Her reading naturally changes her world view and her relationship with people like the oleaginous prime minister and his repellent advisers. She comes to question the prescribed order of the world and loses patience with much that she has to do. In short, her reading is subversive. The consequence is, of course, surprising, mildly shocking and very funny.

This is a novella with a premise that the Queen of England takes up reading, and was a really fun romp. She discovers that she has never been encourageed to have an opinion but quite likes it; her staff stumble to figure out what she is doing and even get rid of her reading valet behind her back. She becomes more empathetic and understanding of her people and is dismayed when others don't also have knowledge about books. Very fun very quick read - would make for a lively book club discussion about the power of the books we read, or don't read.

A surprisingly fun novella. The premise of Queen Elizabeth II becoming a voracious bookworm was rather original and clever. The ending was surprising, but the good kind of surprising.

A comical, quick book where Her Majesty, the Queen of England, stumbles upon the love of reading. A great book about books and the love and enjoyment of reading. Very fast read, only 120 pages.

Some quotes:

‘Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, Sir Kevin, one just wishes one had more of it.'

“A book is a device to ignite the imagination.”

“You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.”

“The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.”

Read it twice, and on the second reading I found myself equally charmed but also disappointed. It hardly begins before it's over. A fictionalized Queen Elizabeth stumbling unexpectedly into the labyrinth of literature, becoming a bookish Queen, causing problems for those who seek to keep her comfortably in her own lane. This book could have been so much more, the book that exists just the starter's pistol for a long exploration of the monarchy, the history she saw and created, veering away from the simple interest of literature into . . . what? A million possibilities appear, the simple opening dominoeing, consequences befalling consequences, wars perhaps breaking out as a result, beheadings in the Middle East, regimes toppled. Rushdie, after all, failed to contain the drama and the absurdity to the page. The Crown isn't popular accidentally. What a great feast of a novel this could have been. And maybe will be. Probably not by Bennett as he is only 7 or so years shy of the Queen at the age of her death, a death which still feels surprisingly untimely — but by someone. It's the type of novel I'm not sure we really get anymore.

Anyway. Read it if you haven't. Bennett is, as previously stated, charming, if a little on the surface.