Customer Reviews: Read 67 more reviews...
 uncommonly good August 3, 2008
One of the best books I've read in a long time. The only negative is that it's too short. I wanted it never to end. It was a treat.
 Cute July 15, 2008
Short novella about how the Queen of England becomes sensitive and human after she unexpectedly becomes an avid reader. This has her staff scrambling to find a way to stop her new obsession so she can get back to her normal duties. Cute story, though the writing is a bit dry and repetitive, with hardly any dialogue. Would have been better served as a short story.
Gorgeously clever, funny and delightful July 1, 2008
The premise of this gorgeous novella is that the Queen, a woman previously devoid of hobbies, suddenly discovers the joy of reading. She starts seizing every opportunity to pick up a book - declaring a sick day or surreptitiously reading in the coach on the way to open Parliament. On walkabouts, instead of asking people whether they've come far, she asks them about what they're reading. This disconcerts and displeases almost everyone around her: her staff, her visitors, the Prime Minister, even her corgis (who get fewer walks).
"The Uncommon Reader" is a deliciously funny book. (I particularly enjoyed the portrayal of the Duke of Edinburgh.) The details are well researched and the premise somehow feels both totally believable and quite fantastic. It's a love letter to reading but also in a way a love letter to the Queen. Plus, the ending is perfect. It's a glorious book that only takes a couple of hours to read, but one of the best that I've read all year.
Uncommonly good June 30, 2008
This probably is one of the most charming books I have read in a long time and by one of the UK's greatest comic geniuses. I have long admired Alan Bennett for his theatrical pieces and in particular the monologues, but this is something delightful in a different sense. Bennett is following much in the footsteps of Flaubert by showing us how reading can change the life of a heroine. In the case of Flaubert, Emma Bovery is destroyed by the false expectations raised by the novels she consumes. The Queen on the other hand, the "Uncommon Reader" of the title, really comes into her own as a person with thoughts and ideas and most dangerously opinions. This upsets any number of interested parties including the Prime Minister and various members of the royal household. This leads to a rather unsuccessful attempt to deprive her of her literary guide, a nice young man from the kitchen named Norman, whose tastes tend to run to gay writers, much to the dismay of her secretary, a New Zealander named Kevin, the Prime Minister, and even the French President. Having a monarch whose idea of conversation is to inquire as to one's thoughts on Jean Genet is something unsettling to that narrow clique who make up "the great and the good."
What Bennett does in this wonderful little book is to show how reading can really change a life if approached in the right way and how it arouses suspicious in the mediocrities who surround the monarch. However it is with reading that the Uncommon Reader discovers writing, something that at the end of the book presents its own dilemmas.
I picked this book up because it was this summer's selection in Fairfax County Virginia's summer reading selection. I found it to be one of the most pleasant surprises provided by a work of fiction in a long time. All I can say in conclusion: "Long Live the Queen and Long may she read!"
 `Hobbies involved preferences and preferences had to be avoided..' June 13, 2008
16 out of 18 found this review helpful
Reading this novella was a wonderful way to spend an hour last night. Wondering about the Queen and her reading habits caused me great concern, though. Democratizing influences could prove to be so unsettling, and one does prefer one's figureheads to remain remote and untainted by populist pursuits.
I jest (well, at least in part). I could think of nothing better than discussing `A Tale of Two Cities' or the merits of `Wuthering Heights' with Her Majesty when next she visits. In fact, I think I should like to compile a reading list for her consideration.
Long live the Queen!
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
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