The Uncommon Reader

It’s the Queen’s Jubilee! Okay, so I missed it by a few weeks, but I actually read this little book—at 119 very small pages, the novella designation is very apt – closer to the Jubilee than I’m finally posting my review of it. (Also, I should add that it has been on my list for quite some time, but all the coverage of the Queen did spur me to actually drive to the library and check it out.)

So, what if Queen Elizabeth II started reading one day and became so addicted that it was all she wanted to do? That is the central question of Alan Bennett’s book, which begins with a rather improbable visit by Her Majesty to a traveling bookmobile/library. Never a tremendous reader, she is suddenly hooked and cannot get enough of the written word. She rides in carriages with a book open on her lap, she dismisses the Prime Minister early from their weekly sessions so that she can resume her stories, and she selects staff based on their appreciation for all things literary. The “peripheral” grandchildren are sent to purchase the titles their grandmother wishes to read next.

It’s all a bit silly, really, although at heart, this is less a book about the Queen’s imagined love of reading and more a book about what it means to love to read. For example, Bennett imagines, “the sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on” and compares literature to a vast country to the borders of which one can travel but never reach. “I will never catch up,” the Queen laments on the same page. And it is true. For how many times have you contemplated the books in the library, or even the titles on an (ever-growing) reading list and thought, “so many books, so little time?” Later Bennett writes of the Queen that she “had not expected the degree to which [reading] drained her of enthusiasm for anything else.” I have often been guilty as charged. 

The Uncommon Reader  is definitely a bit far-fetched (to say nothing of the ending, which was very well done and absolutely made me chuckle), but if you are looking for a fast, light, fun summer read, love books, and can sympathize with wanting to do nothing but turn the page and find out what happens next, you’ll not be disappointed. And if you're more interested in the real life and times of the queen, I'd suggest adding Sally Bedell Smith's Elizabeth the Queen to your reading list.