If nothing else, the nation’s latest online book club will be its poshest. The Duchess of Cornwall has thrown her feathered fascinator into the ring with Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon and Richard and Judy to found — as she announced on her Instagram feed — an online book club called The Reading Room, in which she’ll be sharing personal recommendations, author interviews and kits of suggested questions for exploring the texts.
There’s every reason to welcome this as a serious project. Camilla has been closely involved with the Booker Prize for many years, is a patron of seven literacy charities, and is known to read widely and intelligently. On a short video message, she declares that she has loved reading ‘since I was very small and I’d love everybody else to enjoy it as much as I do. You can escape, and you can travel, and you can laugh and you can cry. There’s every type of emotion humans experience in a book.’ Quite right, too.
Camilla has been closely involved with the Booker Prize for many years, is a patron of seven literacy charities, and is known to read widely and intelligently
A book club like this will prosper to the extent that it bears its maker’s authentic stamp. In this respect, the Duchess’s first four choices seem good ones. All are relatively recent books but there’s no sense they give of the choice being tied to a publisher’s publicity schedule. And what’s best is they feel like personal favourites rather than something cooked up in some Clarence House focus group. It’s nice, and even slightly puckish, as a Booker regular, for the Duchess to have chosen Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light — the only one of Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy not to have made the shortlist.
Will that be taken as an implicit rebuke to this year’s judging panel? Kremlinologists may suspect so, but my hunch is that Camilla wasn’t thinking that politically. It’s a book that gave her pleasure and instruction, so she put it on her list. Then Delia Owens’s Where The Crawdads Sing — the acclaimed debut novel from an American nature scientist. Again, the focus group would have had the heebie-jeebies about this one, not least since it has already been a pick for Reese Witherspoon’s book club. Won’t she look late to the party? Well, books endure. If the Duchess of Cornwall liked it, who cares if a rival book club saw it first? Perhaps it was Reese who put her on to it in the first place. The republic of letters has space for everyone.
Then there’s William Boyd. The focus group might have had marked his application ‘privileged white male’, and Camilla, many of whose best friends are privileged white males, will perhaps have told the focus group to get knotted. Boyd is a writer of great sophistication and accomplishment and his spy story Restless will offer Camilla’s followers all the narrative pleasures the genre promises and a bit more besides. Finally, Elif Shafak’s finely made and richly detailed historical novel The Architect’s Apprentice, set in 16th-century Istanbul. It’s not Elif’s latest — it came out six years ago — but it’s the one, perhaps, that Camilla most recently read and enjoyed, so in it goes; a flavour of the multiplicitous oral storytelling of Islamic tradition, and a book with a tender heart and a baby elephant in a prominent role.
As I say, I would bet that all four of these are books that Camilla has read closely and loved. And that being the case, and continuing to be the case, The Reading Room is very likely to catch on and join the aforementioned rivals as engines of bestsellerdom. Good on HRH. Now to design the promotional stickers. Royal warrants on the front tables at Waterstone’s? Or would that be de trop?
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