World Book Night is back: are you game to give?

Back for a second year, and now taking place simultaneously in the UK, Ireland, USA and Germany on 23 April 2012, World Book Night offers avid readers the opportunity to spread their love of books amongst those who perhaps haven’t quite got the reading bug yet. The concept is simple, even if in practice it might be slightly more challenging: the World Book Night panel has selected 25 titles that cover a fairly wide spectrum of fiction (any group containing both the vampire novel Let the Right One In and The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic certainly can’t be accused of too narrow a range), and the idea is that you pick one, and the generous folks at WBN give you 24 copies of your selected title to give away. The challenging part is that you’re supposed to give them all away on or around Monday 23rd April (Shakespeare’s birth and death date, random fact fans), to people who don’t regularly read. Easier said than done, methinks, but it must have worked reasonably well last year, or they wouldn’t be doing it again, right?

They are aiming to get 20,000 givers signed up in the UK before the deadline of February 1st, so if you’re up for it you should have a think about how you would go about giving your books out, choose one – and a couple of back-ups – from the list below, then head to the site and fill in the application form.

We’ve posted the full list of books for 2012 below, and we're also interested to know how it went for anyone who took part last year. If you were a 2011 giver what was the experience like? Did you feel like you managed to start someone off on a journey of reading through your giving, or was it really hard work to get rid of all your copies? And what do you think of this year’s list? Please post your comments below!  

The World Book Night 2012 Books

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

The Player of Games by Iain M Banks

Sleepyhead by Mark Billingham

Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

The Take by Martina Cole

Harlequin by Bernard Cornwell

Someone Like You by Roald Dahl

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

Room by Emma Donoghue

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Misery by Stephen King

The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella

Small Island by Andrea Levy

Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell

The Damned Utd by David Peace

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman

How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff

Touching the Void by Joe Simpson

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak