So the books that will be on offer on World Book Night, the new event set to celebrate the joy of reading in March 2011, have been named. What do you think of the list?
The books were chosen via an independent panel of librarians, authors, booksellers and broadcasters - so no chance for publishers just to end up pushing authors they wish were more widely read than they are. And what WBN has ended up with looks like an utterly reliable selection to me.
It's clearly not a particularly adventurous set of choices, or all that international. There is unlikely to be anyone on there you haven't heard of, and if you've heard of the author, the book listed here is probably the one they're best known for, or near enough. So no fireworks. We're thinking safe.
But it's also a tried and tested list where you can't go very wrong – books that would be hard for dislike, if you liked reading but didn't necessarily read as much as you might, or hadn't come across a certain author before, and found one of these pressed into your hand by a friend on World Book Night.
All these books have sold very well, some spectacularly so. A few are quite new, but the majority have been around for a few years at least, and some are long established in the status of classic.
But it does seems a shame to me that you have to plump for 48 copies of the same book. There are books here I'd love to donate – I can think of the perfect person for CJ Sansom's Dissolution, and probably a handful more, but I can't think of another 40 I'd really love to give it to. Even I, a rabid Sarah Waters fan, would struggle to come up with 48 people who simply must read Fingersmith. Ideally I'd like a selection of all of them, so I could press an Agent Zigzag on some, Half of a Yellow Sun on others, and Northern Lights on several more.
Jamie Byng, the chair of WBN, talks about the special power of personal recommendation – but book recommendation is really the delicate art of matching the right book to the right person, not of assuming everyone will like the same book you do. It's about empathy with someone else's taste and imagination, and a sense of how to extend it, a more intuitive act than simply pushing your own loves on your friends.
Maybe Byng should think about moving away from the model of donation on an industrial scale, and give people the option to select a set of titles to give away themselves. But is there a book you can imagine will suit 48 people you know? And what about titles that aren't already on the list?
