Do you like to read? Since you’re reading this, we’ll assume yes. How do you feel about books? Despite any rumors you’ve heard, the book is not about to die — not if serious book lovers have their way.
You may find a few local book fans giving away books next Monday, April 23 (and the days that follow) as part of World Book Night, an annual celebration designed to spread a love of reading and books, with local headquarters at Arcata’s Northtown Books. This is the second annual World Book Night; it started last year in United Kingdom and spread to the U.S. in 2012.
The idea is pretty simple. With input from a panel of booksellers and librarians, publishers created special paperback editions of 30 titles by contemporary authors. Volunteers “givers” signed up online and chose a book they feel strongly about from the list. Participating bookstores and libraries act as distributors receiving cases of books, 20 copies of a single title for each giver. (When we stopped by Northtown Books Saturday, they’d already received their shipment.) The givers come in and pick up a pile of books, and then they give them away, no sooner than April 23. Readers read the books, and hopefully pass them along. By the time it’s over half a million books will be distributed.
“This is a celebration of the individual book and the individual reader. I am honored to take part,” said Sherman Alexie, whose book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is among those to be given away locally.
Local givers also selected I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, Little Bee by Chris Cleave, A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving and Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson.
And lest you think that the list was short on desirable best-sellers, Suzanne Collins’ hot title The Hunger Games and Stephen King’s The Stand were also among those available (but not selected by any local givers).
Where will they be giving away books? WBN organizers suggest schools, hospitals, nursing homes and diners, but it’s up to each individual giver. Watch for them next week.
More info here. Follow World Book Night on Twitter or Facebook.
Here’s how it worked in England last year when they gave away a million books:
This article appears in The Yurok Grift.
Schools are a suggested giveaway site? Conspicuously absent from those 30 selected titles are any children’s books. There are maybe three that are young adult fiction, around middle school age.
If the goal is to promote a love of reading, the effort has to begin with children.
from the WBN FAQ:
Q. Why not children’s books?
A. Many, many other wonderful programs already exist to get books to elementary age children. The goal of World Book Night is to seek out reluctant adult readers wherever they are, in towns and cities, in public settings or in places from nursing homes to food pantries, low income schools to mass transit.
It sounds like a wonderful feelgood event, an unexpected happy happenstance, but color me a skeptic.
A person handing out 20 copies of one title seems like one of the most inefficient of methods for reaching reluctant readers, unless the title is specially selected for a given venue… such as The Hunger Games being given out at a middle school. There needs to be strong interest in the book on the part of the recipient. If you give a book to a reluctant reader that doesn’t spark their interest, it does more harm than good in terms of nurturing a love of reading in that individual.
Also, there’s a cognitive disconnect for WBN to state there are already enough book charities for elementary age children, and in the same paragraph suggest WBN books be handed out at low income schools.
Having edited the Journal’s calendar for many years, I can assure you there are local programs that give free books to younger kids pretty much ever week – KEET’s Ready to Learn programs at the Graves Museum for example, and regular events at the HumCo Library. And I’m sure someone somewhere has plans for distributing The Hunger Games at some low income middle school (just not here in Humboldt). Even once I’ve colored you a skeptic, I can’t see how you’d find free books harmful.
Bob, I’m all for giving away free books. I devote 5 to 10 hours a week of my life, year-round, to free books. During the school year, I give away 20 to 50 free books to kids every week. You are welcome to visit the free bookstore I operate on the campus of an elementary school. In March, our parent group held a literacy night with local authors, which included KEET (they were wonderful), and a book giveaway featuring 1,000+ books laid out on cafeteria tables (separate, and in addition to, KEET’s giveaway).
The issue at hand is ‘reluctant readers.’ I read that to mean people who don’t read books very often. That type of person is one who is not good at reading, for whom reading is a slow process… or someone who has a difficult time translating words from a page into ideas and pictures in one’s mind.
My belief is that to love reading you must first be good at reading, and to be good at reading, you must practice. This practice begins in childhood with books that interest the person you’re trying to entice to read.
When you give an uninteresting book to a reluctant reader — a child or an adult — and he has a bad experience with that book, it does more harm than good if your goal is to nurture a love of reading. Reluctant readers have had many bad experiences with books. Reading is a chore for them.
Given the way WBN is going about its endeavor, the odds of matching a book of interest with a reluctant reader seem very poor to me.
A better way would be to offer the reluctant reader a choice of books. Given the constraints of WBN’s approach, at the very least, those volunteers should have 20 different books rather than 20 identical books, to increase the odds that some of the recipients will choose and take home a book that interests them, giving them some measure of inspiration to open the cover and give the book a chance.
I don’t view a ‘reluctant reader’ as someone who just needs to be pulled away from his TV to realize books are awesome. I view reluctant readers as an adult literacy issue. My goal, my wish, is for people to consume information in written form as easily as they can consume information by hearing it spoken. If you can do that, you won’t be a reluctant reader.