strange and random happenstance: The Uncommon Reader

Showing posts with label The Uncommon Reader. Show all posts

Friday, June 1, 2012

Jubilee Book Recommendations

So, now that you've caught up a bit on your pre-Jubilee viewing... what to read in those few spare hours between the onslaught of Jubilee celebrations being broadcast on television? Again, Anglophile that I am, here are a few fun suggestions.

"The Uncommon Reader" by Alan Bennett
First off, this is a totally quick novella, so easy to fit in during the Jubilee celebrations. Also, it's all about the Queen! Alan Bennett has written this sweet story about what would happen if the Queen one day wandered into a bookmobile and felt obliged to check out a book, and then became so in love with reading that it worked it's way into every aspect of her life. Not only does it celebrate reading but, even though it's fictional, it gives you a feeling that you are privileged enough to be given some insight into the Queen. My full review from a few years ago can be found here.

"Baby Cakes" by Armistead Maupin
Barbary Lane goes Burberry. This is easily my favorite book in the "Tales of the City" series. What I love about it is that this story is about all things San Franciscan becoming all things Royal. Between February 26th and March 6th, 1983, the Queen did a royal visit of the west coast of the United States. Maupin wrote the first four books of the series serialized in regular installments in the San Francisco Chronicle, this being the fourth. Therefore the books usually had an immediacy to what was going on at the time. What was going on in 1983 was Royal fever! The character of Mary Ann, as a reporter, follows the daily happenings of the "Royal Watch." Always wearing ever increasing ludicrous hats, or fascinators as we now call them, while at the same time having a to-do with a member of the Queen's entourage. While this is going on in the United States, my favorite character, Michael Mouse Tolliver is over in jolly old England connecting with a long lost friend. A must read for Anglophiles!

"The Queen and I" by Sue Townsend
This book, written by the author most known for her Adrian Mole series, imagines a Britain where a newly elected Republican Party decides that the entire Royal Family must learn to live like other Britons, lower-class Britons on a hideous housing estate in a provincial city. Written as a farce with the Queen's corgi running wild with mongrels, the Queen herself buckles down sturdily, mindful of stiff-upper-lip duty. Written before the death of Diana and Margaret, it's a humorous look at the Royal family coping in trying times.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 2 comments

Labels: Alan Bennett, Armistead Maupin, Baby Cakes, Corgis, Diamond Jubilee, Sue Townsend, Tales of the City, The Queen and I, The Uncommon Reader

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Book Review - Alan Bennett's The Clothes They Stood Up In

The Clothes They Stood Up In by Alan Bennett
Published by: Random House
Publication Date: 2001
Format: Hardcover, 161 Pages
Challenge: Typically British
Rating: ★★★
To Buy(different edition than one reviewed)

Mr. and Mrs. Ransome have been robbed, no burgled, robbed happens to a person, burgled to a premise. Of course this couldn't have been normal thieves, because they took everything. Stove with dinner in it, to toilet paper. Nothing is left and the Ransome's do not know what to do. They spent their life accumulating stuff that never was really enjoyed or served much purpose, except for Mr. Ransome's music equipment that he used to listen to Mozart, which his wife wasn't privy to due to the large headphones he was known to sport. But while the abrupt change in their life seems to serve no purpose for Mr. Ransome, Mrs. Ransome acquires a new sense of control. Being allowed to make buying decisions, going to stores she never would have thought to enter in Notting Hill, watching day time television. Things are slowly shifting due to the cataclysmic event and then one day everything changes again and everything is as it was, but only now it doesn't seem the same.

In this brief yet odd little novella by Alan Bennett I was hoping to achieve the same sense of joy and elation I had when reading The Uncommon Reader. I did not. Such wonderful books are rare and far between and I should not have expected so much of his first book. I found the characters unlikable and unrelatable for the most part. Mrs. Ransome had some humanity, but Mr. Ransome was a bully and his new found porn obsession quite unsettling. At one point, when they located their furniture, I was hopeful. The roguish Martin, who would totally be played by Dean Lennox Kelly in the tv adaptation, brought a life and interest to the story. But his departure took the life away. I thought perhaps this brief contact would bring some life into Mrs. Ransome, but sadly it did not. It only brought about wistful remembrances of Martin on Mrs. Ransome's part, as well as my own. I would like to have read Martin's story. Instead we are left with two hollow people who have an abrupt and surprising end which, while I didn't see it coming, left me liking the novella even less. If you're looking for mild British entertainment with not much depth, try this. If you want extreme British entertainment with loads of depth, pick up Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments

Labels: Alan Bennett, Burglery, Dean Lennox Kelly, Martin, Mozart, Mr. Ransome, Mrs. Ransome, Notting Hill, Reading Challenge, The Clothes They Stood Up In, The Uncommon Reader

Monday, June 29, 2009

Book Review - Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader

The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett
Published by: Picador
Publication Date: 2007
Format: Paperback, 120 Pages
Rating: ★★★★★
To Buy

The Uncommon Reader is a short novella by Alan Bennett, the distinguished playwright and former member of Beyond the Fringe. This is a bittersweet tale of finding something you love too late and having the constant drive to catch up. The feeling of all those lost opportunities and not willing to waste a single moment. The book is built around the premise of what would happen should the Queen wander into a mobile library to apologize for the ruckus her dogs are causing and then feels obliged to take a book out on loan. Her first book is a disastrous choice and the story would have ended there had she not picked up Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford on her second visit. A book she picks up because "novels seldom came as well-connected as this and the Queen felt correspondingly reassured." She becomes so engrossed in the book that she even plays sick to finish it. That second book becomes the jumping off point where she becomes a biblomanic in the extreme, promoting the kitchen boy Norman to be her amanuensis (her "enabler" as it were). One book leads to another which leads to another, all with the feeling that she has left things too late...all the books she won't have time to read, all the authors she has met who she had nothing to say to then. Her work doesn't significantly suffer outwardly, but her keepers begin to worry that she is going batty and attempt to curtail her reading at every opportunity, from claiming they thought a book was a suspicious device (they blew it up) to having packages go missing in transit and her Norman being sent off to the University of East Anglia to get an English degree.

The humor and language are wondrous and full of dry wit. The Queen while reading books discovers that while she is meant to appear human she has never truly been human, being set apart. The books she reads make her understand human nature all the more. But as she learns of the humanity all around her you become connected to the humanity she posses and wish for one second that this glimpse into the Queen and her life were not fiction. You also come away with a desire to read more and more and all the books she talks about you want to have read as well so you could be more included in the jokes. But in the end the Queen comes to realize that reading is a more passive activity, that while it helps you find your life you are still an observer, and she is a doer. Her desire to write then ensues, and I will not tell you the ending because it is abrupt and 100% supremely perfect.

I think every anglophile and biblomanic should pick up this book for a wonderful quick read that was written to coincide with the Queen's 80th birthday. Also pay attention closely to all Alan Bennett's little word plays and subtle distinctions in grammar, when the Queen goes from speaking of herself as "One" to "I" you know something is afoot. One also starts to wonder if the Queen herself has read it. And as a final note, I just love that Alan Bennett used a bit of his old friend and fellow Fringer, Peter Cook's miner sketch about Proust dipping his biscuit in his tea and having all his memories come flooding back to him in the book (make sure you adapt a suitably silly accent with proper slurs when you say this). Or as Bennett stated in the book: "The curious thing about [Proust] was that when he dipped his cake in his tea (disgusting habit) the whole of his past life came back to him. Well, I tried it and it had no effect on me at all."