We all read at different levels. I used to tell my students that it was fine to be enjoying Henry Fielding one week, Stephen King the next and Colleen Hoover the week after if you feel like it. Throw some graphic novels, non-fiction, poetry and anything else you fancy into the mix. Real Readers have eclectic tastes. Besides you will never develop any critical judgement if you always read in the same genre. And it doesn’t matter two hoots whether it’s a hardback with an arty cover, a dog-eared paperback or a digital download. It’s the content that counts. What fun I had subverting stuffy, blinkered teaching colleagues who were portentously instructing the students to read Shakespeare, Dickens and Orwell (preferably in antique bindings) to the exclusion of all else.
Sometimes, moreover, we all need to read – for comfort, maybe – about people and situations which are so close to our own world and experience that we could almost reach out and touch them. Ask my 20-something granddaughters, both of whom are addicted to Freida McFadden.
As for me, I have recently been unwell with a really horrible, three week-long cold (or was it some other viral thing?) in the middle of which I had double cataract surgery. I couldn’t – almost the worst part of the whole experience – read at all for a few hours but as soon as I could I reached for Julia Jarman’s latest “Widows” novel: The Widows’ Book Club. And apart from anything else it was a delicious contrast to Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis which I’d reread a few days earlier. Reading as widely as possible is healthy. I rest my case.
This is the fourth book in the series featuring three women from Bedfordshire who originally met at a rather awful bereavement group and, soon joined by a fourth, decide to meet regularly and form their own support system. They like wine, food, dogs, clothes and, of course, nice men of a certain age. Now, with three of them quite happily “partnered”, they have to start a book club as a ploy to deal with Janet’s old friends, Lewis and Christobel who’ve come to live nearby in a Very Posh house. Christobel is bossy, difficult and puts backs up – and the relationship between her and her rather lovely husband of 45 years seems a bit odd.
I spotted where the plot was going at about the halfway point. It didn’t matter, though. Jarman writes so wittily that reading this book is like sipping a delicious cup of high quality, creamy hot chocolate. I love the way, for example, she includes the subtext – what characters are thinking rather than saying – in italics.
Zelda’s partner Richard, whom she met on a cruise in the third book, is a blind internationally renowned American cellist whose guide dog Billie sits alongside him at performances. When he plays the Elgar concerto at a Prom, all four women go to the concert. Yes, this really is a world I know although, much as I’d like to, I’ve yet to see a guide dog on a concert platform.
It’s good fun – especially if, as I was, you’re feeling a bit under the weather. Probably best to start at the beginning of the series, if you’re new to these books, though.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Horse by Geraldine Brooks
