Today the team behind World Book Day have launched their Spread the Word campaign 2009, highlighting books that deserves to reach a wider readership this year, books ‘that don’t merely entertain, but give greater food for thought.’
There’s a longlist of 50 and obviously it’s a crazy notion that there are only fifty books in a year that are worth talking about, and an even crazier one that there will eventually be a single winner, but, quibbles aside, any vehicle for elevating books to be believed in that doesn’t rely on how much budget publishers have to hand for front-of-store bookshop promotions is most welcome.
Of course we’re delighted to see two Canongate books on the list. For anyone who hasn’t yet come across the comic genius that is Dan Rhodes, Gold is a great place to start. Laugh-out-loud funny, with a bittersweet streak running through it, Gold is funny, tender and highly entertaining. Dan’s brilliant website is well worth a visit, not least for the list of scathing reviews of his books he’s reproduced.
And then there’s Fup, a little gem of a book by the inimitable Jim Dodge. Short but sweet, irreverent and irresistible, Fup reads like a fable for the post-religion generation. I defy you not to fall in love with the eponymous Fup, the twenty-pound mallard at the heart of the book. Read more about it in this great piece by our good friend at Waterstones.com, Greg Eden, and watch out for our brand spanking new edition next year.
So, here comes the plug. We’d like to encourage you to register for the Spread the Word site and cast your vote for the book you think should be most talked about. We’d like you to vote for Fup, we’d like you to vote for Gold, but most of all we just want you to vote for something. God knows we need to do everything we can to get people talking passionately about books in general. As well Fup and Gold, I’ll also be voting for Anita Amirrezvani’s The Blood of Flowers, a book which on the face of it sounds downright unapprochable (the story focuses on an apprentice carpet-weaver in seventeenth-century Iran) but is acutally a sensual and other-worldly love story that sweeps you along. It's a bit gooey, but it's a goody.
Finally, whilst I’m at it, I’ll mention one other book which was longlisted last year for the inaugural Spread the Word campaign and which I actually think deserves and needs to be talked about more than probably most of the books on this list and in fact any future list (contentious I know but I’m really passionate about this one). A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali is one of the most powerful books I have ever read, and, I’m certain, am ever likely to read. It’s a punch between the eyes, a book that provoked such a strong physical reaction in me – tears, of course, but also shock and even nausea at times – that I had to take a couple of breaks during reading it. The Rwandan genocide meant little to me at the time it happened (I’m ashamed to remember how disinterested I was in the world as a teenager) but this book truly opened my eyes, putting a human face to those staggering numbers (between 800,000 and 1,000,000 people are estimated to have killed in just 100 days). Since it was published we’ve seen a couple of brilliant films about the genocide (Hotel Rwanda and Shooting Dogs) but to my mind A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali beats these hands down. It completely changed the way I think about Africa and considering recent and ongoing situations in Kenya, Sudan and of course Zimbabwe, it’s a book that I think is as relevant today as it was when it was first published.
