The Uncommon Reader

* * * * * (5 stars)
Alan Bennett
Faber and Faber Limited, Great Britain,
and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, U.S., 2007
Hardback
ISBN 0374280967

Here is a reader’s feast, a book that makes me laugh out loud, in which everything happens as, of course, it would, once the Queen of England notices “a City of Westminster traveling library, a large removal-like van parked next to the bins outside one of the kitchen doors [of the Palace].” She borrows one book, then another… and declares she might have a cold, so that she can stay in bed all day and read.

Adult people with responsibilities, duties, schedules, and promises to keep do not stay in bed all day and read. Oh, but we do, when the book is good and the excuse is adequate. This is such a book.

The Uncommon Reader describes the progress of a love affair, from first meeting to life-transforming experience — a love affair with reading. The Queen comes late to this passion, which usually happens in childhood, so she can read Nancy Mitford, early on, instead of Beatrix Potter. But as she progresses, so do I, remembering what I rarely think of: learning to read, burning through the grade school library, sitting down among the opened Christmas presents and starting Little Women, taking my first mind-trips to England and Africa among the boughs of the old willow next door. Failing to hear the telephone, vacuum cleaner, frustrated mother. Pride and Prejudice at 10 (by flashlight, which wasn’t enough help), then at 15, 20, 25….

This book reveals the seductions of reading, but more: the strange effect that books have, how they send the mind off in unexpected directions, prompt untimely curiosity. To the president of France, over the soup at a state dinner, the Queen says, “I’ve been longing to ask you about the writer Jean Genet…. ”

She hardly recognizes herself, and her staff begin to find her… unreliable. But we know what to do: lend her a really great book to read. Choose it with love and thought, and give it with joy. A book like this one.

Reviewed by Feral (also reviewed by Kelli Frankenberg; see below for a different take)