At World Book Night they are first and foremost passionate about great books. Books that when you start reading them you really don’t want to stop and when you’ve finished reading them you instantly want to press into someone else’s hand and make them read it to.
With this in mind they’ve now launched the World Book Night Book Club so that every month they can talk about the book that they’ve fallen for.
Connect with them on Facebook and Twitter @WorldBookNight for your chance to win a copy.
Their first choice for May is…
The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion
What’s it about:
Don Tillman is a professor of genetics. He’s also overly meticulous, punctual in the extreme, takes everything literally, has no sense of humour, eats the same seven meals on rotation each day of the week and is very lonely. He knows what he wants, so devises a questionairre to help him find the perfect wife – and christens it the Wife Project. In his search (via speed dating, set ups and group dates) he encounters Rosie who very definitely isn’t wife material (she drinks too much, smokes, wears make up and dyes her hair, is late for everything, impromptu and unreliable and ‘only’ a barmaid, even if she also happens to be the most beautiful woman Don’s ever met). Rosie wants to find out who her biological father is and, intrigued by the challenge, Don agrees to use his expertise and access to the university’s DNA testing facilities to help her out, breaking about every rule he’s ever made along the way.
Why they love it:
It’s a publisher’s job to tell you that each book they publish is the best thing since sliced bread, that their book is the new ‘insert title of most relevant to plot-line recent bestseller’. So I couldn’t resist a chuckle when a book arrived on my desk that was being compared to both One Day and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (both of which are up there with our favourite books and we were very proud to feature in the first WBN back in 2011). It would have to be a pretty special book to live up to those comparisons. The Rosie Project doesn’t warrant either of those accolades – it neither needs nor deserves to be compared with anything else at all. It really is a one of kind book and upon first reading it I found it so delightful, so joyful and such an utter pleasure that I immediately read it again – this time out loud to my husband, who loved it too.
The book is both hilarious and extremely touching. It is of course a love story but it’s also about how we discover who we really are, what our place in the world is and the lengths we’re prepared to go to, to find the answers.
Don, our hero, is something of an enigma. He’s aware to an extent of his unusual behaviour but because it’s who he is and he accepts it, it’s fairly normalised – till you witness his interactions with others who don’t find it anywhere near normal. There are moments when you absolutely cringe for him, when the humour shifts firmly into the extremely uncomfortable territory and you barely want to see what’s happening any more. It’s all written in first person but Graeme Simsion’s skill opens up Don’s world to us far beyond that which Don himself is aware of. Considering his personality (Don clearly has Aspergers or some form of high functioning autism and though when we first meet him he’s preparing to cover for a friend at a lecture to Aspie teens he never consciously sees himself on the same spectrum so his condition isn’t discussed) it would be easy to get cheap laughs at Don’s expense, but this never happens. Yes Don is clearly infuriating at times and there is much to laugh at in his social interactions, but he’s so unashamedly good that even when he’s being unkind (whether to students or prospective wife candidates) or people are mean to him, there is a sympathetic truth to it that prevents it from being cruel.
Rosie is also everything you want in a heroine. Sassy, fun and completely believable, her damaged tough girl act is the perfect foil to Don’s naive intellectualism. And it is perhaps the extreme believability of the characters and of the situation that makes the book so charming. Though Simsion very much takes the role of author as benign god, setting challenges, difficulties and adventures for his characters to overcome, their story seems so possible, so natural and so real that you want things to go well for them (though Simsion keeps you guessing till the very end how it actually works out).
Graeme came to London specially to celebrate World Book Night and read from The Rosie Project at our London event. Watch him read about what happens when Don takes his Wife questionaire to a singles party.
Go to the website to read the first chapter of The Rosie Project
Visit therosieproject.co.uk where you can learn more, buy the book or even take the wife questionaire…
What happens now World Book Night is over?
On World Book Night 2013 20,000 volunteer Givers across the country shared their love of reading with those who don’t regularly read in their communities. The organisers have been receiving some amazing stories of what happened from both givers and receivers and are just beginning their evaluation which will help them inform future plans.
They will be surveying everyone who took part and conducting more in depth interviews to ascertain exactly what happened, where the books went, who they reached and how successful the project has been in engaging new readers, and this will be made publicly available later in the year. In the meantime you can read some of the stories they’ve been receiving on their blog.
One more thing:
One third of households in the UK don’t have a single book in them. At World Book Night they want to change that, change lives and open up a world of possibility to those who haven’t discovered why reading matters. But they need your help – not just as a book lover and passionate volunteer but also, if you can, as a donor.
“Last year I was a giver: one women told me she felt special that I had given her a book as she had never owned a book of her own, she could not read and it was a burden she wanted to share but had been ashamed; she wanted to help her small children to read but could not. We gave her support so she was able to go to our community college and has made fantastic progress, I met her a few weeks ago and she said she has tried to read The Book Thief but it is still a bit difficult but she is determined that she will read it all. She is helping her son read with confidence. If one book can start something so good what could we do with 100?” – Children’s Centre Manager, The Wirral
Please click here to find out more about how you can support World Book Night.
