Camilla Talks About Her Love of Reading as She Launches a New Royal Book Club
The Duchess of Cornwall has long been a passionate advocate of literature, releasing her lockdown reading lists throughout the spring and summer. And as the UK remains in the grip of yet another lockdown, she has launched a new initiative called The Duchess of Cornwall’s Reading Room, beginning with a list of four books.
“To me, reading is a great adventure. I’ve loved it since I was very small and I’d love everybody else to enjoy it as much as I do,” Camilla said in a video released by Clarence House. “You can escape and you can travel and you can laugh and you can cry. There’s every kind of emotion that humans experience in a book.”
The first four books are: The Mirror and The Light by Hilary Mantel, Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia Owns, Restless by William Boyd and The Architect’s Apprentice by Elif Shafak. Clarence House says that the titles will be highlighted for two weeks on the Instagram account @duchessofcornwallsreadingroom, which will feature information about each book and its author. Book Club Kits have also been created by researchers as part of the Lockdown Reading Project, a collaboration between the University of Portsmouth and the University of Copenhagen to study how reading habits are changing throughout the pandemic.
Camilla has also released a video explaining what she hopes people will get out of the book club. “I think I’d like it to be something that everybody could delve into and find something that suited them and enjoy it,” she said. “I just think it’s because I love reading myself I think a lot of other people also get a huge amount of pleasure from it.” The Duchess added that after releasing her lockdown reading lists last year she had been contacted by people from “all over the world” about reading, adding “it’s a lovely way of communicating.”
Camilla has a long history of working with literary-focused charities, and is patron of seven such organizations including The London Library and The Wicked Young Writers Award.
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