![]() ![]() The Crocodile, by the great Russian writer Dostoyevsky, is incredibly brief, and it’s a sharp social satire with plenty of teeth. This is most often characterized as a short story, but it’s substantive enough to have been published in its own volume multiple times. It's not the tale of a monarch who wants to become an author or a pundit rather, it’s that of a woman in a public role who wishes-just like so many other busy women-to reclaim a private space for her own peace. She attempts to shrug off various royal obligations by claiming she’s involved in her latest book, and when her private secretary, Sir Kevin, suggests that HRH might “harness your reading to some larger purpose-the literacy of the nation as a whole, for instance,” she tartly responds “One reads for pleasure … It is not a public duty.” Her family appreciate her newfound pastime because it means she leaves them alone, but things devolve as the Queen grows sloppier in her clothing choices and spends more and more of her time talking about books with courtiers who couldn’t care less about literature. In the famed dramatist Alan Bennett’s novel, Queen Elizabeth II discovers a traveling library in a van by happy accident and becomes addicted to reading, with unexpected and sometimes hilarious results. ![]()
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