On Being a World Book Night Giver

Giving away my twenty World Book Night copies of The Knife of Never Letting Go didn’t prove hard at all: Tuesday was a gorgeous spring day, and in the late afternoon and early evening I walked through my city’s packed streets and parks and found eager, grateful recipients for ten books. The remaining ten copies were left in places where I knew they’d be found, and I have had word that by the next morning they were all gone.

I decided from the beginning that when approaching people I wasn’t going to be pushy: I was going to accept “no, thank you” for the valid answer that it is and move on. There were some people who were hesitant, and in those cases what I did was tell them a little bit more about this book that I love so very much – after which some said yes, and others said no.

I loved the experience of being a World Book Night giver, but halfway though the day I had an epiphany of sorts: I stopped feeling like the fact that it was the readers who were taking the books off my hands meant I was doing it wrong. I don’t want to make hasty assumptions about the people who took my books, but my suspicion is that they all shared a baseline level of receptiveness to the idea of reading a book, and that you need to have that to work with for something like this to be a success.

Before I go any further, I want to clarify two things:

1) I love World Book Night. I love the passion and generosity behind it; I love that there’s a day when all this enthusiasm about reading finds a public expression and gets so much media attention. Seeing excitement about books always makes me happy, and I do think that collective excitement has a way of being contagious – people want to find out what the fuss is all about, and in the process they often discover that they’re interested in things they never paid much attention to before.

2) Spreading a love of reading is something that matters to me, both as a person and as a libraries professional. There are several reasons for this: the most obvious one is the fact that literacy is a crucial skill in our world, and the more you read, the less likely it is that you’ll become one of the millions of people who are functionally illiterate. Being a confident reader has the potential to improve people’s lives in tangible ways. Then there’s the fact that I think stories matter and play a crucial role in our lives, for all the reasons so brilliantly articulated in this post. And while books are not the only way to engage with stories meaningfully (a point I’ll return to later), they remain an important way.

So yeah: I want more people to discover the pleasure of reading; I want to live in a world where there’s a vibrant and thriving literary culture – and while I’m more optimistic than most when it comes to how endangered the habit of reading for pleasure really is, the idea of introducing new people to books is one I can absolutely get behind.

According to the World Book Night website, this is exactly what the event is for. The “About” section tells us the following:

Through its unique delivery World Book Night involves tens of thousands of people in sharing the value of reading in their communities and delivers brilliant books directly into the hands of those who might never otherwise engage with books and reading.

I do think there are brilliant and creative ways of achieving this goal, and I have no doubt that there are plenty of people out there who managed to do so. Also, I realise that by writing this post I run the risk of coming across as having given up from the get-go. It’s very easy to wonder whether if I had tried harder, some of the noes I got would have been yeses. What I started thinking about halfway through World Book Night, though, was what would happen if we collectively decided that this was enough. World Book Night is a wonderful initiative that runs purely on a passion for books, and what could be better than that? But the reasons that make people decide that reading is not for them are complex and demand complex solutions. Obviously World Book Night never claimed to be the ultimate fix-all response to the literacy divide, and it’s important to get behind solutions that help in small ways, because all those efforts do add up. But I really hope that amidst all our enthusiasm, we don’t get caught up in thinking that we have done our bit and that all that’s left now is to shrug and feel sorry for the people who wouldn’t accept the gift of a free book.

Throughout the day I saw many, many tweets along these lines: people repeatedly said they felt sorry for, pitied, or wanted to cry for all the people who had refused the books they were trying to give away (ETA: though this was not the only thing I saw, of course). I understand where they’re coming from: it’s saddening to be rejected when you’re trying to share something you’re so passionate about and that you think others should embrace. But I worry that no matter how good our intentions, when we say we feel sad for others we come across as just one more voice tut-tutting people for not doing more of what they “should” be doing, when they’re already under so much pressure. I’ve written about my concerns that the way we try to sell reading is potentially condescending and counter-productive several times over the years, and World Book Night caused all those thoughts to resurface.

My takeaway from being a World Book Night giver is this: the only way I can make the event meaningful and rewarding for me personally is if I think of it as an opportunity to pass on a specific book I love to others, with no questions asked and no assumptions made about their reading habits. I can’t feel that to succeed I have to take on the many complex problems surrounding the perception of reading as an elite activity. I can’t make it about how we should be challenging these problems but sometimes end up accidentally reinforcing them. The other reason why I made a deliberate effort to stop wondering whether the people getting my books were reluctant readers is because I think we should remember more often that people who are already readers also benefit immensely from readers’ development initiatives. I worry that the idea that if you’re a reader then the job has been done reinforces the myth that “reader” and “non-reader” are static, discrete categories. I worry that it reinforces the idea that being a reader means belonging to an exclusive club where you’re either all in or all out, and that people walk away in shame because they don’t think they’ll ever be allowed to be all in.

I want people to read more, but I also want to remember that in many cases it will take more than an eager stranger with a box of free books to convince them to take the plunge. I want to spread a love of reading, but I want to find a way to do so without perpetuating the myth that readers are superior human beings by definition; that reading books is the only way to be an intelligent, thoughtful person who’s intellectually engaged with the world. There are other meaningful ways to consume stories or information, and I don’t want to tell the people who favour them that I pity them.