What do You think about Writing Home (2003)?
I actually really like Alan Bennett but this was just too much of everything, I dare say that the publishers don't expect the reader to sit and read the book from cover to cover but rather to dip into it when they feel like it but I'm a bit of a masochist like that and once I've started a book I will finish it come hell or high water. I really enjoyed the Lady in the Van and there are a lot of interesting little anecdotes about various rich and famous people but you would have to be a real die hard fan to give this a 5 I think.
—Christine
Kate Bush can sing pi to umpteen digits and make it sound beautiful. I'm not sure about Alan Bennett's singing voice but he is someone who I could listen to pretty much all day with that calm, measured, slightly hesitatnt way of his ... and he writes that way too.Bennett excels when it comes to observational writing; who else could have written the Talking Heads monologues and got Thora Hird to swear and then defend Bennett afterwards?He's also the kind of writer where you literally can pick up anything by him, open up the book arbritrarily and start reading.
—Jim
Hilariously funny and brilliant collection of essays, literary criticism, diary excerpts and other short writing from a British comedian and playwright that I really ought to have known by name, but did not despite having a heard of a number of plays and films which he wrote. Most recently, The History Boys ran on Broadway for half of 2006 to considerable acclaim, forcing me [though I did not see it] it to reconsider my rule that no play called anything Boys is worth seeing - perhaps I can still hold the line at the spelling "Boyz".One of the most moving and fascinating segments is a description of a more or less insane old woman who had nowhere to live but a small van type of automobile (that didn't actually run) whom Bennett, through a combination of charity and inertia that I bet we can all recognize, allowed to park her vehicle and live in it in his tiny London front garden for the last 15 years of her life.
—Bob
