Alan Bennett’s “The Uncommon Reader”

I can’t recall how I came across this short little novella. Somehow it made it onto my “to read” list on Goodreads, and when I needed a couple of extra dollars in my  B&N cart (to spend a Groupon… so many modern references!), I added it. How grateful I am for that impulsive decision!
In The Uncommon Reader, Alan Bennett imagines an alternate reality where Queen Elizabeth II stumbles across a traveling library, checks out a book to be polite, and reads it, because, “Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up. Books, bread and butter, mashed potato – one finishes what’s on one’s plate. That’s always been my philosophy” (11). She had picked a book at random because she recognized the author as an acquaintance, and though she found it dull, she felt compelled out of politeness to check out another. Soon she’s hooked. She begins reading compulsively, even propping a book on her knees while she’s waving out her carriage. The formerly prompt queen begins running late and stops paying attention to her dress, to the point where her servants begin to worry that she’s developing Alzheimer’s. Her ministers attempt to hide her books and dismiss Norman, her friend and guide through literature, in the hopes that it will dissuade her from this new (and apparently dangerous) pastime.
The book is both a fun imagination of the Queen’s inner life and a mediation on the joys of reading. She beings writing down what she thinks about the books she reads and it’s a short step from this to writing about what happens to her in her life and what she thinks about the people she encounters. The surprise ending reads something like a drop off a cliff, but on contemplation, seems the perfect ending to this short little tale. Highly recommended!

Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Committed”

I read Eat, Pray, Love just when the dreaded movie cover edition (the concrete point when you know that you’re merely jumping on the bandwagon) came out, while I worked at CTY in Baltimore summer 2010. Betsy and Kelsey had both recommended it to me, but I have to confess the primary reason I succumbed to the hype and picked up the book at the JHU bookstore was that her new book, Committed, had been announced. Judging merely from the press releases, I though I would enjoy Committed, as a fellow skeptic of marriage, more than a book on sadness, pizza, and yoga. Eat, Pray, Love is a mediation on overcoming grief through introspection and moderated self-indulgence. Despite being increasingly more open to introspection and mediation in my life, I still found Gilbert’s first book to be overly sentimental and at times slow. I loved the middle section about prayer in a Buddhist temple, but the rest had its flaws.
The upshot of it all was that I waited six months before I bought Committed, and then in large part because I found it on sale. And then it took me a further two months before I read it. Life circumstances, however, encouraged me to pick it up. I have to confess, one of the things that attracted me the most to Committed was that Gilbert was an admitted skeptic about the institution. After her first divorce, she swears off marriage and all its potential disappointments. The source of the second book comes when her partner, Felipe, is deported because he does not have the proper visa to live in the United States. In order for them to live together in the States, they must acquire a fiancé visa and marry. While this is being processed, the two travel in southeast Asia while Gilbert obsesses over marriage.
I enjoyed Committed much more than Eat, Pray, Love, which I believe I can attribute to the comparatively small percentage of introspective/personal woe in favor of historical tales of marriage. Gilbert pulls these “asides,” as she calls them, both from personal encounters (including her own family history) as well as from “scholarly” sources. Gilbert forcibly claims at the opening of the book that she is not an anthropologist or an expert on marriage history, and recommends further reading for those who wish to find that kind of book. I think I appreciated what she said much more when she was talking about her mother’s or her grandmother’s experience, or even of the marriage customs of the local tribe she encounters on her travels, than I do when she talks about herself.
In the end, it was a good book to read for me at the time, but I don’t know how highly I would recommend it. It’s a very quick read and enjoyable for its ease, but it was also a shallow treatment.