What in the World is World Book Night?

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World Book Night is coming to the United States this year, and may just be arriving on the streets of Tioga County as well. On the evening of April 23, 2012, nearly 50,000 people will go out into their neighborhoods, across the United States, armed with twenty free copies of a book they are enthusiastic about sharing with people who currently don’t read much. The goal of World Book Night is to start conversations about books, between people who have been inspired by books, and folks who may think books don’t have much to say to them.

Book givers choose one book from a list of thirty books, designated as “accessible works of enduring quality” for this year’s event. The book givers then receive twenty copies of the title of their choice. The World Book Night titles are specially-produced, not-for-sale editions, to be freely given, to foster community literacy, communication, and the kind of conversation that comes out of people talking about a story that touches them.

In looking over this year’s list of thirty books, it is obvious how the choices match the mission statement for “accessible” stories: many aren’t “literary classics” in the traditional sense, but are instead contemporary books with appealing plots, intriguing characters, and realistic dialogue, across a broad spectrum of topics. (This is not to say that we shouldn’t read, or wax enthusiastic, about “literary classics”, which is one reason these works are taught in school.) World Book Night seeks to appeal to non-readers or light readers who need other books, or places besides school, to draw them in to quality writing and the joy of books.

The choices for World Book Night USA, 2012, include female and male authors, target both young adult and adult audiences, and were published as early as 1969 and as recently as 2010. They and their authors have won several awards; some have been made into movies and TV shows; a couple are regularly banned from school curricula or libraries; a couple have been dismissed by academics as “just popular fiction”; some have been touted by talk show hosts or TV book clubs. These books cover every topic from alien invasion to anorexia, from growing up in Afghanistan to doing mission work in Africa. Chosen from every genre from memoir to science fiction, murder mystery to the history of modern genetic research, there truly is something for everyone.

The organizers of the first World Book Night were inspired by the success of “World Book Day”, a literacy celebration in the UK and Ireland, now in its fifteenth year. On the first World Book Day, more than 600,000 school children cashed in a token in exchange for one of a list of specially-chosen books. As their website states, World Book Day is a partnership of people who love and work with books, who want to inspire a love of reading in children. Every child under 18 who is in full-time education in the UK or in Ireland receives a token. These tokens can then be taken to a bookshop and used either to redeem one of eight specially-produced World Book Day books, or to receive a “1 pound” discount off a regularly-priced book of their choice. On this March 1st, over 14 million book tokens will be given out in order to get children “closer to the books and authors they already love” and to help them discover more to love for their futures.

The first World Book Night was just a little less than one year ago, on March 5, 2011, all across the UK and Ireland. Backed by big-name authors, large publishing houses, bookstores small and large, it met with huge success. This year – only the second year of World Book Night as an event – will be the first year the success and spirit of World Book Night spreads to the United States. The hope is to encourage its growth into many more countries over the next several years.

For more information about World Book Night, including a full list of the thirty books chosen, check out their website at http://www.us.worldbooknight.org/ and watch for more news in the coming weeks, as book givers are chosen from the pool of applicants, with nearly twenty-five applicants from this area!

"Surviving" Summer Reading

Kasey Cox

While the kids, parents, and teachers are counting down the last few days of school, bookstores and libraries are getting ready for the influx of questions about books for summer reading. Most kids have summer reading that they’re “supposed to” do, whether by parental encouragement or by teacher mandate. For the lucky kids, this summer reading is not a chore, because they’ve discovered the joy of the reading. For other students, reading is more difficult, but I’m a firm believer that people just need to find a story that interests them. One of the first questions I ask reluctant readers is: “What do you like? What are you most interested in?” I don’t mind if the answer is a game or a TV show, since we can still work with that. I want to know what they like about that story – because there’s the hook.

One book which reigns high on the list of hooks for reluctant readers is Gary Paulsen’s young adult novel, Hatchet. This Newbury Honor book had its 20th birthday in 2007, and at that point, it had sold over 4.5 million copies. Hatchet is the story of Brian, a teen boy whose parents have recently divorced. He’s headed to northern Canada to spend the summer with his father, a mechanical engineer working with oil companies in remote locations. For the last leg of the trip, it’s just Brian and the pilot of the little Cessna. They crash. Brian has next to nothing to use for survival, except a hatchet. It’s a great story, the kind of story many of us find ourselves caught up in, whether it’s Tom Hanks marooned in the movie Castaway, or silly old TV series like Gilligan’s Island, or more gruesome events from history like the Donner Party. We like survival stories – adrift at sea, settling the prairies, captured as a prisoner of war, crashing in the mountains.

We’re lucky, then, to have so many stories like this to read (even if the people in the stories aren’t always so lucky). History itself is filled with such stories, especially American history, as our ancestor immigrants carved out new lives in harsh, strange places. And then there are the people who like to live even closer to the edge, the mountaineers and the extreme sports enthusiasts. In searching for more stories like this, I recently found Norman Ollestad’s memoir, Crazy for the Storm. Norman’s experience at age 11 reads like a version of Paulsen’s Hatchet. The book opens with the crash scene – Norman, 11; his father, 43; Dad’s girlfriend, Sandra, 30; and the pilot of a little Cessna, crash into the San Gabriel Mountains in California during a storm. At 8,600 feet, on steep slopes of almost shear ice, Norman is the only one left uninjured. His father and the pilot are dead. Sandra is gravely injured. It’s snowing. I won’t tell you the details that Norman relays in what people are lauding as beautiful, terse, Hemingway-esque prose, chapter by chapter, as he got down the mountain. I will tell you I couldn’t put the book down. I honestly read it in one sitting, from the middle of a sunny Sunday afternoon until late that night. I had to know how he did it.

Norman attributes his survival to his relationship with his father. In alternating chapters, this well-crafted memoir takes 11 year old Norman down the mountain, and relates growing up with his father who was constantly pushing him to surf, ski, play hockey, and hike remote areas almost as soon as he could walk. I have to admit, at first I was annoyed with the chapters reminiscing about younger life with Dad, living on the infamous Topanga Beach in the 1970’s, a crazy drive through Baja California. I wanted to get back to the mountain survival chapters. As I continued to read, however, I realized that young Norman’s experiences with his father – from being strapped to his father’s back as a toddler while Dad went surfing, to being ferried constantly to black diamond ski slopes for competitions – WERE part of his journey down that mountain.

So, if the kids are clamoring to see the twenty-third reincarnation of “Terminator” this week at the Arcadia, maybe you should let them go. Then you can use that as a segue to read and talk about some great books together. Challenge yourself and your family to have adventures together this summer, both on the page and in the outdoors.


Hobo likes hiking, but spelunking scares him. He’ll be helping kids survive summer reading by making some appearances at the bookstore. Watch for his schedule at his blog: http://frommyshelf.blogspot.com. Surf on by to see him.