For the first time this year, there will be a World Book Night to follow a few days after World Book Day. Notice of this inaugural event found its way into my email just before Christmas, as they were looking for volunteers to give away one million books on March 5th. Naturally I applied to be a volunteer and I just found out that I’ve been successful! Hooray!
The book I selected to give away 48 copies of is The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark. Many reasons for this but particularly because it is set in Scotland and written by a Scottish author, plus we did plan to read this book with the book group a year or two ago and it got cancelled, not to mention that it’s a very short book (approx 150 pages) so lugging 48 of those around would be a lot easier!
For those interested, here’s a list of all 25 titles that will be given away on World Book Night:
Half of a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Harper Perennial)
Case Histories – Kate Atkinson (Black Swan)
The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood (Virago)
A Life Like Other People’s – Alan Bennett (Profile & Faber)
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – John le Carré (Penguin)
Killing Floor – Lee Child (Bantam)
The World’s Wife – Carol Ann Duffy (Picador)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon (Vintage)
New Selected Poems – Seamus Heaney (Faber)
Rachel’s Holiday – Marian Keyes (Penguin/Poolbeg)
The Reluctant Fundamentalist – Mohsin Hahmed (Penguin)
Agent Zigzag – Ben Macintyre (Bloomsbury)
Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez (Penguin)
Life of Pi – Yann Martel (Canongate)
Stuart – Alexander Masters (Fourth Estate)
A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry (Faber)
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell (Sceptre)
Beloved – Toni Morrison (Vintage)
One Day – David Nicholls (Hodder)
Northern Lights – Philip Pullman (Scholastic)
All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque (Vintage)
Dissolution – C.J. Sansom (Pan)
Toast – Nigel Slater (Fourth Estate)
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark (Penguin)
Fingersmith – Sarah Waters (Virago)
I think this is wonderful. Anything that encourages more people to read is just fantastic. Oh and I own 18 of the 25 books on this list!
