This is the second instalment in our Bookbenchers series.
What book’s on your bedside table at the moment?
There are two books on my bedside table. I’m a Gemini so one is never enough. I am simultaneously reading The Book Thief by Markus Zusak and After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre.
The Book Thief is the story of a young girl whose parents have been taken to a concentration camp and who is fostered by a family in Nazi Germany. The book is narrated by death, which is both peculiar and gripping. It’s a wonderful insight into humanity in the most extreme of circumstances.
What book would you read to your children?
Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice
Sendak, if for no other reason than when Max had finished his great adventure and found himself back in his own room, his supper was waiting and ‘it was still hot’. Such reassuring, comforting
words for a little one which carry the subliminal message that things very out of the ordinary and unexpected can occur in this life, but the person who loves you best of all will still be there,
waiting, and everything will be just as it should. All children need that level of reassurance in this big scary world.
I would also read them Winnie the Pooh, because the tales of Pooh Bear and Christopher Robin stay with children throughout their lives waiting to be handed on to the next generation. Pooh Bear will live forever.
What literary character would you most like to be?
I suppose if I were younger I would love to be Elizabeth in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Who wouldn’t fall
in love with Mr Darcy? However, as a mother of three beautiful daughters and a home full of wishful, visiting suitors, these days I’m more of a Mrs Bennett. Whichever, there are a host of Jane
Austen characters I would love to be.
What book do you think best sums up ‘now’?
I think the book that best sums up society today is After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre, which I am still reading.
Although originally written in 1981 and now in its third edition, the book explores and explains the moral culture of modernity and the problems thereof. I’m not sure, however, that it provides the solutions or answers. It isn’t an easy book to read and at the end of each page I wish there was someone with whom I could talk it through with who understood the Enlightenment, Aristotle and Aquinas more than I did. Nevertheless, I am aware that I’m reading a book which offers a view of society which, in contrast to the book’s central theme of modernity, is timeless.
If the British Library was on fire and you could only save three books, which ones would you take?
The Complete Works of Shakespeare because I am passionate not only about his writing but also about the time in which he lived.
When my father died, there was a tiny, beautiful, navy blue, hard backed book with silver embossed writing on the cover called The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico on his bedside table. I would save that book because it is set during WWII, carries a delicate poignant message and is very special to me.
Finally, Harry Potter, the full works, or if not I’d grab the three best, The Philosopher’s Stone, The Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix.
Fleur Macdonald is editor of The Omnivore.
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