Although I didn't feel that I had read much over Christmas, I found that recently I have finished Alan Bennett's An Uncommon reader, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel, last week. This last read was quite intriguing; I thought on starting it that it would be a bit heavy going, but not a bit, I kept wanting to find out what happened to her next and how she achieved all that she has in a foreign country and strange language. What a woman she is and what a stoic. She doesn't believe in sitting down and moaning about her lot in life, but carries on and thinks out a way of working out her own way of getting to where she wants to be. Her revelations about Islam were eye-opening for me, ignoramous that I am about Islam in many ways.
Alan Bennett's book on the other hand has so much sense to say about reading and all told in the gentle yet sharply observed tone he uses. The story of the Queen visiting a mobile library outside Buckingham Palace and taking a book out to be polite amd reading it all the way through because she was brought up to finish what she had started, and then reading one book leading to another and another, is delightful, but there are serious messages about reading in it. As a lifetime reader and chartered librarian, I found the comments Alan Bennett makes, in the form of the Queen's thoughts about reading, spot on.
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