Anuradha, a voracious reader, enjoyed reading The Uncommon Reader: A Novella by Alan Bennett. The premise of the book is adorable- what happens when a monarch becomes a book addict? There will be consequences, of course. With unmistakable British humor, Bennett traces the lifecycle of the reader. A reader is consumed by a book and utterly changed by the time the book is digested. “Consciously and unconsciously, books shape the voice in your head. It changes the way you perceive reality. In this case, the Queen ignores her royal duties and I am sure many of us have ignored our duties as well, especially when we are caught up in a book!” Anuradha said.

The readers in the room sighed in collective agreement.

Manya spoke about the bestselling book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon. The story revolves around Christopher John Francis Boone, a boy who knows his facts and has a photographic memory but can not comprehend emotion. “The plot changes every 50 pages and is readable in one sitting,” Manya said.  She also read out a delightful passage from the book:

“The psychologist at school once asked me why 4 red cars in a row made it a Good Day, and 4 red cars in a row made it a Quite Good Day, and 5 red cars in a row made it a Super Good Day, and why 4 yellow cars in a row made it a Black Day, which is a day I don’t speak to anyone and sit on my own reading books and don’t eat my lunch and Take No Risks. He said that I was clearly a very logical person, so he was surprised that I should think like this because it wasn’t very logical. I said that I liked things to be in a nice order. And one way of things being in a nice order was to be logical. Especially if those things were numbers or an argument. But there were other ways of putting things in a nice order.”

Check out 20 questions with Mark Haddon and watch him speak on YouTube here.

More books in Part 4.