Happy World Book Day!

Whether or not your city or even country participates (yet!) today is World Book Day. If your community is part of it, go out and play. If not? Maybe you’re just as lucky: you can feel justified in grabbing some extra “me” time to read a book!

Didn’t get enough time to plan? Don’t despair: the UN’s World Book and Copyright Day is coming up on April 23rd. Irina Bokova, director general of the UN says, “Our goal is clear -- to encourage authors and artists and to ensure that more women and men benefit from literacy and accessible formats, because books are our most powerful forces of poverty eradication and peace building.” You can get more information here.

Rankin and Mosse Join the Quick Reads Roster

Ian Rankin (Exit Music) and Kate Mosse (Sepulchre) are the latest in a long line of well-known authors pressed into service writing Quick Reads, a four year old UK initiative creating terse but exciting books by bestselling authors and celebrities. The books are aimed at adults who are new readers, out of the habit of reading for pleasure or who simply prefer a quick read.

It’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done but it’s been very, very interesting,” Mosse told the Guardian. She explained that writing the book in line with the Quick Reads guidelines, which demand very short sentences and no words longer than two syllables, was an “enormous challenge … it might be called a Quick Read but It’s been far from a quick write for me.”

Crime author Ian Rankin has also written a new book for Quick Reads: his A Cool Head is the story of a young man Gravy who finds himself caught in the middle of a robbery gone wrong. Other contributors include John Boyne with The Dare, told from the perspective of a 12-year-old boy whose mother hits a child with her car, and a book from the Dragons’ Den entrepreneurs about finding success. Jacqueline Wilson has written an introduction for a title about getting your child to read, while Murder Most Famous winner and Coronation Street actress Sherrie Hewson has contributed her debut thriller, The Tannery.

The new titles will be available on World Book Day, which happens every March. While you wait, you can check out the available titles at the Quick Reads Web site. The full Guardian piece is here.

Celebrate Books Every Day

Did you know March 1st was World Book Day? Me neither. Maybe that’s because, according to the World Book Day Web site, the organizers “are delighted to be celebrating the 10th Birthday of World Book Day in the UK and Ireland in 2007. Over this relatively short period World Book Day has become firmly established as the biggest annual event promoting the enjoyment of books and reading.”

Since I live in neither Ireland nor the UK, I guess this pretty much leaves me out. But it shouldn’t, since -- you know -- the name has that meaningful “world” in it. And books are something to celebrate.

I’d suggest we all take it over and make it our own (I mean, why should the UK and Ireland get all the fun all the time?), but there’s a snag: World Book Day has some competition from World Book and Copyright Day which, according to Wikipedia, “is a yearly event on 23 April, organised by UNESCO to promote reading, publishing and the protection of intellectual property through copyright. The Day was first celebrated in 1995.”

And apparently this World Book Day has some claim on the date:

The connection between 23 April and books was first made in 1923 by booksellers in Catalonia as a way to honour the author Miguel de Cervantes who died on that day. This became a part of the celebrations of the Saint George’s Day (also 23 April) in the region, where it has been traditional since the mediaeval era for men to give roses to their lovers and since 1925 for the woman to give a book in exchange. Half the yearly sales of books in Catalonia are at this time with over 400,000 sold and exchanged for over 4 million roses.

Wikipedia (not always the best resource on the planet, but always an interesting one) is clear as mud on the whole World Book Day thing. I gather that some people celebrate World Book Day in April and some celebrate in March and some ... well, there’s probably more we haven’t even heard from yet.

Here’s a thought: maybe all the World Book Day people should get together and decide on a date. It sort of waters the whole thing down if it’s just here and there all willy-nilly.

Or are we meant to take a lesson from this? Maybe we just need to go on the way we’ve been going, celebrating books every day of the year.

I kind of like that idea, myself. Maybe we could settle it with a meeting?