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.
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