Week Nine

Books.  I love them. I love seeing a row of them on my shelf, colourful,  worn and dog-eared.  I love their papery and musty smell.  I love the sound when you turn a page, almost like you're flicking a wave.  I love them piling up in my house and having big huge pretty ones on my coffee table.  Basically.....bollocks to  e-books.  I don't have the slightest interest in ever getting one as it just feels like another way our lives and brains are becoming mechanised with technology.  Its the same reason I won't have a Satnav in my car - what's wrong with reading a map?  I like to use my fingers and my brain and work things out for myself.

So yes there is a threat to the good old-fashioned paper-bound book but all is not lost.  There are clearly millions of others who feel the same way as I do otherwise World Book Night wouldn't have happened; an awesome initiative to inspire adults to read by giving away 1 million books.  It launched on Friday in Trafalgar Square with a host of celebrities and authors reading excerpts from some of their favourite books and poems and I am just so ridiculously glad I took on my 52 week challenge as I honestly don't think I would have known about it otherwise.

I arrived to Trafalgar Square to find the place swarming with very still bodies and was greeted with a deathly silence other than the voice of Mark Haddon, author of the wonderful "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time" reading from his book.  It was a captivated audience.  I hadn't looked into who was going to be there on the night but I was absolutely delighted to spend the evening listening to amongst others Margaret Atwood, David Nicholls,  Phillip Pulman and John Le Carré.  The irreverent Graham Norton was presenting from the faux living room up on stage below Nelson and as I took my place in the throng we were greeted by one Boris Johnson reading  a passage about a hangover from  Kingsley Amis'  Lucky Jim.  He read with all the charisma, verve and exuberance you would expect and it was hysterical.

Our mayor

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood was one of the better texts I read at A-Level and it was one that really made an impact on me and I remember her writing really transporting me to the action - what any good book should do.  So whilst hearing her then and there, reading from "Blind Assassin" I was pleased to experience the enthralment once again and didn't even notice the noise of the traffic swirling round me, nor the bitter cold.

All the readers were wonderful and engaging but without a shadow of a doubt, the best for me was David Nicholls.  I was completely and utterly engrossed.  He read from "One Day", a book I read and very much enjoyed last year and he picked the most brilliant excerpt to recite; a letter from Dexter to Emma and he literally read it as if he had really written this letter but was speaking directly to her - completely natural, unforced dialogue, charming, hilarious and totally brilliant.  Love him.

David Nicholls as Dexter

I have never read any John Le Carré as I'm not particularly a fan of espionage but what a legend! He read from "The Spy who came in from the Cold" and having recently been to Berlin on holiday I found it so easy to picture his descriptions of Checkpoint Charlie and envisage the spy riding on his bicycle, coming to a fatal end.  I wouldn't mind picking the book up now.

I arrived a little late and was gutted to have missed Alan Bennett, another one of my A-Level saviours but the rest more than made up for it, as well as a little repartee between Graham Norton and some of the book "givers" from the initiative on stage.  After the final reading the 5,000 or so people standing in the cold were invited to swap their books with someone and I wish I'd known as I didn't have a book to swap with someone.  However, some delightful man gave me one of the 25 titles that was being given away anyway; a novel by Nigel Slater called "Toast".  How great?  Turn up and get to listen to some of the world's greatest novelists and some of the most stunning books and then watch as complete strangers warmly engage, give their favourite books away and talk about how much they love them.  I'm really starting to love London again.  

Next week I'm going to see 2 dark, comic magicians called Barry and Stuart. Weird.

Lovely Graham Norton