Book Appointment Now
This royal reading list is full of brooding reads
Kate Middleton may wear a tiara with practiced ease — and her left hand still boasts a starring role on the list of the royals’ gorgeous engagement rings list — but her bookshelf is where you’ll find the real crown jewels. Among her carefully styled Penguin clothbound editions photographed in her Kensington Palace study is the thousand-page labyrinth that is “Bleak House,” adding a Dickensian layer of legal absurdity.
Of course, no true British reading list would be complete without a nod to the Bard. Middleton’s pick, “The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint” delivers the goods (and also classes as a convenient gateway to get into your Tortured Poets era, given Taylor Swift’s well-documented allusions to Shakespearean drama). Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray appears too, its satin decadence barely masking moral rot, whilst Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Hound of the Baskervilles” brings us the sumptuous logic and flair of Sherlock Holmes. Homer’s “Odyssey” is the lone Greek outlier in this primarily British canon, though it stays thematically right at home with its long journey and hunger for home.
But Middleton also showed a softer side of her reading life when she shared the stories she now reads to George, Charlotte, and Louis. For Camilla’s Reading Room book club, she shared a trio of children’s classics now in heavy rotation “Stig of the Dump,” “Charlotte’s Web,” and “The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark.” Reflecting on the last title, she told her step-mother-in-law, “I loved this book as a little girl and listening to my own children reading it has brought back so many wonderful memories.”
