The Uncommon Reader Read Online Free PDF Page B

corridor. And it was true; she was. She enjoyed reading like nothing else and devoured books at an astonishing rate, not that, Norman apart, there was anyone to be astonished.
    Nor initially did she discuss her reading with anyone, least of all in public, knowing that such a late-flowering enthusiasm, however worthwhile, might expose her to ridicule. It would be the same, she thought, if she had developed a passion for God, or dahlias. At her age, people thought, why bother? To her, though, nothing could have been more serious, and she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing, that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.
    To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease. The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time. The next stage had been when she started to make notes, after which she always read with a pencil in hand, not summarising what she read but simply transcribing passages that struck her. It was only after a year or so of reading and making notes that she tentatively ventured on the occasional thought of her own. “I think of literature,” she wrote, “as a vast country to the far borders of which I am journeying but cannot possibly reach. And I have started too late. I will never catch up.” Then (an unrelated thought): “Etiquette may be bad but embarrassment is worse.”
    There was sadness to her reading, too, and for the first time in her life she felt there was a good deal she had missed. She had been reading one of the several lives of Sylvia Plath and was actually quite happy to have missed most of that, but reading the memoirs of Lauren Bacall she could not help feeling that Ms Bacall had had a much better bite at the carrot and, slightly to her surprise, found herself envying her for it.
    That the Queen could readily switch from showbiz autobiography to the last days of a suicidal poet might seem both incongruous and wanting in perception. But, certainly in her early days, to her all books were the same and, as with her subjects, she felt a duty to approach them without prejudice. For her, there was no such thing as an improving book. Books were uncharted country and, to begin with at any rate, she made no distinction between them.
    With time came discrimination, but apart from the occasional word from Norman, nobody told her what to read, and what not. Lauren Bacall, Winifred Holtby, Sylvia Plath — who were they? Only by reading could she find out.
    It was a few weeks later that she looked up from her book and said to Norman: “Do you know that I said you were my amanuensis? Well, I’ve discovered what I am. I am an opsimath.”
    With the dictionary always to hand, Norman read out: “Opsimath: one who learns only late in life.”
    It was this sense of making up for lost time that made her read with such rapidity and in the process now adding more frequent (and more confident) comments of her own, bringing to what was in effect literary criticism the same forthrightness with which she tackled other departments of her life. She was not a gentle reader and often wished authors were around so that she could take them to task.
    “Am I alone ,” she wrote, “in wanting to give Henry James a good talking-to?”
    “I can see why Dr Johnson is well thought of, but surely, much of it is opinionated rubbish?”
    It was Henry James she was reading one teatime when she said out loud, “Oh, do get on.”
    The maid, who was just taking away the tea trolley, said, “Sorry, ma’am ,” and shot out of the room in two seconds flat.
    “Not you, Alice ,” the Queen called after her, even going to the door. “Not you.”
    Previously she wouldn’t have cared what the maid thought or that she might have hurt her feelings,