The Uncommon Reader is a little hard to classify — I guess it’s alternate history? — but the premise is essentially that Elizabeth II happens upon a bookmobile, starts reading a lot, and Is Changed.
This is a book for book lovers, and specifically, for deepish Anglo-biased “classic” catalog readers (George Eliot, Nancy Mitford, EM Forster … but also some non-Anglo authors e.g. Vikram Seth, Tolstoy). Like, if you read Ready Player One and your reaction was “this is not for me, this is for an American 80s nostalgia nut” BUT you read a lot (and hey, if you’re on Cannonball Read, you probably read a lot), you might find that this one IS for you. Tonally, it’s light and funny and just kind of whimsical, and it’s novella-length so it just flies by.
As the story progresses, the main source of conflict is that the Queen becomes increasingly absorbed in her reading. It starts interfering with her time spent with her household, with her ministers, and even with her Corgis. And the point that the book makes, to the degree it has one (this book is very slight), is that books can be a vehicle to discovery and awareness and an escape from a controlled information environment. That the Queen becomes more aware of and engaged with the world as she actually withdraws from it and into her books is the through-line, and it comes to an earned and natural conclusion.
The other thing it made *me* think about, though, was … how lovely, to have a billion trillion dollars, and invest your time in seeking out knowledge you don’t have rather than adding dollars (or pounds) to the scoreboard. What a dream. What a dream to have the power to do it … and what a dream that a billionaire, with that power, would choose it.
CBR18Bingo: wheels. The inciting event is her happening across a bookmobile.
