Tuesday, October 30, 2007


Books of The Times
Has Her Majesty Read Any Good Books Lately?

I reviewed this charming title a few weeks back, here is the New York Times take on it......

Queen Elizabeth is known for loving her horses and her corgis. She has sat, reportedly, for more than 120 portraits, conferred some 400,000 honors and awards, met with a long parade of prime ministers and attended countless garden parties and receptions. She has frequently been described as an exemplary monarch, dedicated and dutiful and decent. And just as frequently described as a forbidding mother, chilly and withholding and given to playing ostrich whenever it comes to emotions.

THE UNCOMMON READER
By Alan Bennett
120 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $15.
(Profile Books in Commonwealth NZ$30)


One thing she has never been described as is an avid reader. One biographer asserted that the queen once asked if Dante were a horse — or a jockey. Another biographer declared that she rarely reads a book unless it is horse-related.

Enter Alan Bennett, the deft, virtuosic author of plays like “The History Boys,” “The Madness of George III” and “The Lady in the Van.” In “The Uncommon Reader” Mr. Bennett poses a delicious and very funny what-if: What if Queen Elizabeth at the age of 70-something were suddenly to become a voracious reader? What if she were to become an avid fan of Proust and Balzac, Turgenev and Trollope and Hardy? And what if reading were to lead her, in turn, to becoming a writer? Mr. Bennett’s musings on these matters have produced a delightful little book that unfolds into a witty meditation on the subversive pleasures of reading.

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