I recently passed a book entitled The Uncommon Reader on to Mrs. Kline, with the understanding that she will pass it on to Mrs. Paprocki, who will pass it on to Mrs. Pagakis. After that, we’ll decide where it goes next. It’s not a book I’d recommend for students, only because the allusions would be lost on those who haven’t read a lot of books beyond young adult literature. But it is a book I’d recommend for any adult who believes in the transformative power of reading.
The premise of this delightful, witty novella is what happens when the Queen of England, through a chance encounter with a bookmobile, discovers books and begins to read. As Her Royal Highness delves deeper and deeper into the world of words (biography, novels, philosophy, poetry, etc.), she is slowly changed and ultimately so is the country.
Two of my favorite things about reading are contained within the above paragraphs: transformation and sharing.
No one who reads avoids being changed by what they read. Even reading a newspaper article about an airplane crash, a bid for the 2016 Olympics, or the historic election of the first African-American president, the reader is transformed. Information, images and ideas are stored, compared, acknowledged or disavowed, connected, incorporated, and evaluated. This is truer still when readers encounter more substantive works.
I think Mrs. Kline, Mrs. Paprocki and Mrs. Pagakis all teach because they believe this, which, of course, is why I wanted to share The Uncommon Reader with them.
The most and only essential relationship in reading is that between the writer and the reader. Yet reading can be and often is a social act. This book is a case in point: a friend of my mother recommended The Uncommon Reader to her, and she passed it along to me. As I read the book, I made a mental list of all the people I looked forward to sharing it with. I anticipated the conversations we would have about it: our favorite allusions, those we missed (Who was Ivy Compton-Burnett?), the laugh-out-loud moments, HRH’s progression through the genres of literature, and, of course, our joy at reading a work of fiction that conveys the passion for reading we try to instill in our students every day.
Even the common reader cannot avoid the power of books.
3 responses so far ↓
1 James Yarnall
// Feb 23, 2009 at 5:10 pm
As Ms. Stewart knows (full disclosure: we have been married for 20 years), I sometimes wonder whether I read a bit too much -- that I'm sliding on my obligations to the "real world" and taking sanctuary in words. I have a t-shirt that declares, "So many books, so little time." There is a saying that was used often by my parents and siblings to the effect that, whenever a crisis occurred, "Jimmy was upstairs reading."
Be that as it may, I can't seem to get over a lifelong habit. One of my great joys is to encounter a book or an author for the first time and wonder where he/she/it has been all my life. Another is to re-read a book that I read originally long ago and discover how it and I have changed.
As to the specific book at hand, Ms. Stewart passed The Uncommon Reader along to me as well, and reading it was, as they say, about as much fun as you can have in a public place. It's a slight thing, a bagatelle; but it manages to combine hilarity with genuine (albeit gentle) seriousness. One would love to know what the queen thought of it, if only the queen did read.
2 pagakisk
// Mar 15, 2009 at 9:22 am
Thank you, Mrs. Stewart, for sharing this lively read. I loved the combination of humour, astuteness and seriousness. The author, Alan Bennett, somehow conveyed in an entertaining way what I often have difficulty expressing to, and impressing on, my students - the power books have to better our characters and make us more aware of the people who surround us. I loved the subtle changes that began to occur in HRH's perception of the world around her.
As a teacher of literature, I also fully appreciated when HRH came back to a book that she had once struggled through and realized that she hadn't been ready for it all those months before, but that she had progressed so much in her reading and thinking, that she was able to appreciate the book so much more when she was ready for it. Sometimes, I feel in education we force books on students that they simply aren't ready for, and I wonder how much we are actually dissuading them from reading instead of showing them the power in it.
3 stewartn
// Mar 15, 2009 at 10:35 am
@pagakisk I knew you would enjoy this book, Ms. Pagakis, and I'm so glad I was able to share it with you. You are so dead-on about forcing students to read things they aren't ready for. Challenging students is good - essential - but too much challenge can reverse the intended effect.
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