Hardcover, 128 pages
English language
Published Feb. 11, 2007 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
The Uncommon Reader is none other than HM the Queen who drifts accidentally into reading when her corgis stray into a mobile library parked at Buckingham Palace. She reads widely ( JR Ackerley, Jean Genet, Ivy Compton Burnett and the classics) and intelligently. Her reading naturally changes her world view and her relationship with people like the oleaginous prime minister and his repellent advisers. She comes to question the prescribed order of the world and loses patience with much that she has to do. In short, her reading is subversive. The consequence is, of course, surprising, mildly shocking and very funny.
Delightful. Not many books I come across can be tagged "monarchical whimsy, but this is perhaps the third after Townsends Queen and I and the utterly spectacular Your country needs you! By MV Harland.
here, of course, the ending is a brilliant clonk over the head. I had to stop myself barking with laughter at the final sentence, as it was gone 1 in the morning when I read it.
