Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2007), a novella, is such a good book. The reader is the current Queen Elizabeth, who picks up reading in the years immediately preceding her 80th birthday and finds it liberating and elevating. It’s a book about reading and the life of the mind and coming to terms with oneself.
In the end she turns to writing, which leads to a stunning denouement better left unrevealed here. Writing her memoirs, that is, but not showing and telling with them: no gossip but “analysis and reflection,” as she tells her assembled privy councilors from her 50-plus years as queen, gathered for her birthday in a festive tea.
Proust weighs heavily in this decision. So does Ivy Compton-Burnett, whom she had “damed” some time back without reading a thing she had written. Wonderful, wonderful book.
Buy it here, through Google, or here, at ABE Books.
Blithe Spirit 