I love to talk about books but sometimes people I don’t know will talk books to me. Yesterday I went to the doctor’s. She took my blood pressure and checked my pulse. Then she started. She told me she was reading a book every girl in Australia should read. And the boys too, she added.
It was the 1914 Emmeline Pankhurst account of her part in the suffragette movement in the UK, My Own Story. She had downloaded it onto her Kindle before travelling and after the trip was now enjoying reading it each night.
As she printed off forms for routine blood tests and prescriptions and I recommended the book I’m reading, Julia Baird’s Victoria the Queen. If you’re reading it before bed, I told her, it will keep you going for a couple of months but persisting with the length is worth it. Fascinating history and really well-written. Queen Victoria was a lot more than the grump she appears to be in her statues. She was an intelligent and passionate woman, attuned politically to her subjects’ sentiments on a range of issues. The doctor wrote me a note with the details of her book and a note for herself about mine.
Another recommendation came last week from a woman in my walking group. As we tramped up and down suburban streets for the good of our hearts, I told her about the book I am writing (more about that later). The first readers wanted a more hopeful ending. Read The Bridge by Enza Gandolfo, my walking companion urged. Despite its exploration of the grim impact of the Westgate Bridge collapse on people, the last chapter was both satisfying and hopeful.
So now I’m talking books to all of you. I look forward to sharing with you my appreciation of novels I’ve read as well as book recommendations received by word of mouth.
Paperback, 364 pages
Published 1979 by Virago (first published 1914)
Title: My Own Story
Author: Emmeline Pankhurst
ISBN: 0860680576 (ISBN13: 9780860680574)
Paperback, 696 pages
Published 2016 by Random House
Title: Victoria The Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire
Author: Julia Baird
ISBN: 978 0 7322 9570 7 (paperback)
Paperback, 384 pages
Published 2018 by Scribe Publications
Title: The Bridge
Author: Enza Gandolfo
ISBN: 9781925713015 (paperback)
ISBN 1925713016 (paperback)
ISBN 1925713016 (paperback)