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.