World Book Night 2014

I have a friend who was badgering me to become a part of World Book Night last year, enthusiastically shoving her three chosen Book Night titles into my hand.  I was very reticent, to say the least.

 My excuses were:

1. As regular readers of this blog will already know, I am mainly a reader of magazines (a habit started when baby giants prohibited the cover to cover reading of any significant volume)
2. I have the reticence of a cynic and don’t mind admitting that the cautionary words – ‘this concept seems too good to be true’ sprung to mind
3. I am not as prolifically intelligent a literati as said friend. The only books we’ve had in common over the years have been cook books and even then, she’ll be digesting patisserie, whilst I’ll tuck into the entrées.

Personally though, the smell and feel of a book knocks the kandle/cuddle e-readers into a tactile mad hatter’s hat. I don’t mind admitting that the sniff of a crisply new paperback, transports me back to my own childhood dates with Noddy, the Famous Five, Tom and his Midnight Garden and a couple of books by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

Nine months after my introduction to Harlequin and the White Queen, I could almost be classified as the Sceptic (ok, that’s meant to be Spy) Who Came in from the Cold.  My curiosity had got the better of me.

After my cursory look at the World Book Night site last year, I have revisited - clicking around the site and being consumed with the dawning realisation that this really is an amazing idea.

Looking at the 2014 Book List, I was transported back to the heart-wrenching book fairs that rolled into my school. They always tempted me with pile after pile of trinket like books: Charlotte’s Web, Anne of Green Gables, Aesop’s Fables and Just So Stories; to name but a few of my book lust list.


I knew that the family book buying pot was completely empty though, and my cuddled pile was slowly re-distributed back to its original habitat.

All my ‘wanted books’ memory went back on the travelling bookshop stacks and I clicked away from the WBN site, a little troubled by my recollection.

But I felt inspired by The Reading Agency charity’s mission too:

World Book Night is about giving books and encouraging those who have lost the love of reading – or are yet to gain it – to pick up a book and read. Line by line, paragraph by paragraph until they too have discovered the power of reading and the opportunities in life that reading can open the door to.

So, this week, my Something for the Weekend suggestion is to take a look around the World Book Night site. Although too late to be a book giver (applications closed on the 23^rd January), there is plenty of time to find out more before the night itself on the 23^rd April.

Finally, I would like to close by saying that I know I am fortunate to have some very good friends, but one of them in particular is indeed a copiously intelligent bookworm, who has probably got her wish in the end. She certainly has given me a nudge to pick up my love of books again. How about you?