Who’s it to be? Becky Bloomwood, Sophie Kinsella’s blabbering shopaholic? Or Old Big ‘Ead in David Peace’s The Damned Utd? The list of 25 titles that are to be given away on World Book Night (23rd April 2012) was unveiled in Waterstone’s Piccadilly shop last night. They are 25 varied books, with a mixture of established classics and cult non-fiction. There are victims and villans, sages and fools, and lovers and mothers. Meanwhile, Colin Firth and Laurence Olivier are jostling to be Leading Man, as Jane Austen’s Mr Darcy goes head-to-head with Daphne du Maurier’s Maxim de Winter.
The reference to cinema doubles as a criticism of the list: there’s plenty on it that you won’t have read, but nothing of which you haven’t heard. And that’s true of more than just the film adaptations, of which there are more than a dozen on this list. Bill Bryson, Iain Banks, Emma Donoghue, Paulo Coehlo, Martina Cole, Bernard Cornwall, Stephen King? You could be at the supermarket checkout.
The thrill of World Book Night is being collared by someone who talks with sane enthusiasm about a book or author of which or of whom you’ve not heard. Even the most persuasive advocate will fail to cajole me into reading, say, Terry Pratchett. Rightly or wrongly, I feel that I know I won’t enjoy it. Challenging such mindless preconceptions is the point of World Book Night, which is laudible. But I’d prefer to be given an unusual book, or a masterpiece that has fallen out of fashion, and see whether I too can rediscover it.
Anyway, here’s the list in full:
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (Vintage)
The Player of Games by Iain M Banks (Little, Brown)
Sleepyhead by Mark Billingham (Little, Brown)
Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson (Transworld)
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (Harper Collins)
The Take by Martina Cole (Headline)
Harlequin by Bernard Cornwall (Harper Collins)
Someone Like You by Roald Dahl (Penguin)
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (Penguin)
Room by Emma Donoghue (Pan Macmillan)
Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier (Little, Brown)
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber)
Misery by Stephen King (Hodder)
The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella (Transworld)
Small Island by Andrea Levy (Headline)
Let the Right One In by John Ajvde Lindqvist (Quercus)
The Road by Cormac McCarthy (Pan Macmillan)
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (Vintage)
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell (Headline)
The Damned Utd by David Peace (Faber)
Good Omens by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman (Transworld)
How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff (Penguin)
Touching the Void by Joe Simpson (Vintage)
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (Vintage)
The Book Thief by Markus Zuzak (Transworld)
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