Review: A Book That Changed My Life – These Feel-Good Stories About the Power of Reading Are TV Magic

Amazing and lively stories unfold in these honest tales of lives truly transformed by literature – as Queen Camilla goes through a few moments. "Sorry, what? Can we back up for a second? I have a few more questions I want to ask. Sadly, she goes on to mention tricoteuses

You've got to love the documentary where Queen Camilla reveals that one of her favorite books as a teenager was The Scarlet Pimpernel because "I was kind of obsessed with the guillotine at the time." "I'm sorry, what? Can we back up for a moment? I have a few more questions I want to ask.

Alas, he goes on to refer to the Knitters in A Tale of Two Cities as "terrible women", so hopes of Camilla's coronation as the end of a very long scheming play by Shanda are finally dashed. But if anyone was going to be an aristocratic sleeper agent trying to overthrow the monarchy from within, it was Camilla. Clearly born to be the most playful of girls, she has a twinkle in her eye as she reminisces about her younger self that still makes you wonder…

By the way. While we wait for the ultimate truth to reveal itself, there's plenty to divert and—somehow, even in this farewell year of 2026—pick us up on the book that changed my life. Produced by the BBC in partnership with the Open University and in collaboration with the Queen's Reading Room to mark the end of the National Year of Reading, this book does a wonderful, if remarkably unsentimental, job of elucidating the transformative power of reading. This sort of thing can easily turn into vomit-inducing horror, but here the stories told by people of encountering, to the extreme, the books that change, and in some cases even save, their lives are told so honestly that all the tonal trappings common to Hephalomes are resolutely undisturbed.

Omar found a copy of Jack Higgins' best-selling World War II thriller The Eagle Has Landed when he was a teenager serving a two-month sentence at Feltham Prison for breaking and entering. One of the previous prisoners had left it behind. "The first time I read a book was in that place." He had been seriously injured in an accident as a child and was hospitalized for a long time, had fallen behind in school, started running away and turned to crime. He read well enough, he says, "to be on stage," skipping over words he couldn't understand. "It was amazing to be out of the cell," he recalls. "It literally, literally lets you escape." As his reading improved, "it allowed me to step into a new world — communication, emotional regulation and understanding and the nuances of being in an environment outside of crime."

Peter, a lorry driver from Liverpudlian, was born deaf and, like Omar, fell behind at school - "one of the worst times in the world" - and left without being able to read. Her self-loathing (she was told she was "as thick as two shortboards") and the alienation it brought, especially when her children were born, pushed her to the brink of suicide. His wife convinced him to start a Read Easy course - a last ditch effort to learn this elusive skill. Her teacher, Alison, "got me". The first book he read was Harry Potter. Peter says he was himself, like the boy who came out from under the stairs and became a wizard. "It sounds so bad. But it's true, at first."

Interspersed with these larger stories are shorter interviews with various (non-famous) readers from all walks of life. They are really passionate explosions, like fireworks. A woman with pink hair (apologies for the lack of names - I don't know if they were added to the play version, but my preview didn't have them), who was apparently sent to a school for nonconforming children in response to her severe dyslexia, remembers being left out of her snowy classrooms and riots with "one word, one word, one word" at a time. I'm on a dock." A man who didn't read at all as a child ("books were just things at school") turned to the classics after they caught his eye, and here he says, "I only realized writers were dead when I tried to email Oscar Wilde." One fan of The Girl With the Louding Voice remembers being caught singing at a wedding. "In my defense, the bride was late and there's only so much small talk I can take." If you know, you know.

And the Queen goes about her business, telling anecdotes about 'my husband' that laugh at Wodehouse, as they sit together in the evenings and sing, 'So indifferent! I can't go back to my book!” - then recalls how she cried throughout her father's book of previous engagements, described wartime experiences she never spoke about, and always adapted from "my simple belief that books make life better".

Omar currently offers literacy workshops in prisons. Opus started by reading the book "Man in Search of Meaning" by Viktor Frankl. "Reading... it's the way out of everything. It's like abracadabra."