Plain Talk
By Mursi Saad El-Din
On 4 March Britain celebrated World Book Day, an event originally scheduled by UNESCO to take place on 23 April. It was altered by the British to avoid it coinciding with the Easter holidays. A myriad of activities, mostly aimed at encouraging people to read, marked the occasion. Book clubs were particularly active, so were the educational authorities, who organised a reading competition with a set of tempting prizes. Of all the programmes on offer, I was especially drawn to the Mayor of London's campaign, entitled "Get London Reading". Posters announcing that "Books take you further" can be seen at bus stops and underground stations everywhere, and 12 new books with a London theme have been selected as the focus of the campaign's advertisements. The project aims at both providing Londoners with knowledge about their city and instilling in them the love of reading.
To coincide with the World Book Day, a survey about the readership in England came out. Book keepers, it turns out, head the list of book readers, devoting an average of five hours a week to the activity. It is, somewhat surprisingly, members of the clergy who are at the bottom of the list, with an average of two hours and 40 minutes a week devoted to reading books. Secretaries come second in the list, with just under five hours, followed by MPs, journalists and taxi drivers, then lawyers and teachers. The survey has also revealed the different kinds of books read by different kinds of people. Politicians read biographies and history books, as may well be expected, while JRR Tolkein is a favourite among the clergy. While most people do their reading in bed, accountants spend more time reading on their way to work than anybody else.
British cities have been competing in what amounts to a reading crusade, as it were. One interesting experiment in Manchester is called "book crossing", and involves leaving books in taxis, on buses and park benches, marked with the message "Read me" or "Take me home". Started in April 2001, the project has so far released 500,000 books. Bristol organised the Great Reading Adventure, which involves "community reading", an effort to mobilise book clubs, public libraries and local bookstores to have the whole city reading the same book at the same time. According to The Independent 's coverage of community reading, the project director believes that book clubs and other reading-oriented activities "need not be the preserve of a well read middle-class intelligentsia. I was amazed," he announced, "to see Treasure Island went to the top of the list... We had a massive response. Library borrowings went up to 16,000." One book among several books that have proved particularly popular throughout Britain is Jerome K Jerome's Three Men in a Boat. It is interesting that, of all cities, Oxford should have adopted the title for its community reading programme, with bookshops that normally stock more academic titles, like Blackwells, acquiring more and more copies to meet exponentially rising demand.
I mention Jerome especially because he was one of my favourite authors during my university years. Along with two of my colleagues, I became well known for it. We were so impressed with Three Men in a Boat that the three of us contributed a series of articles to the English Department Magazine, collectively entitled "Three Chaps in Distress", in which we recounted a series of comic adventures of our own in the manner of Jerome's book. It was not until 1956, much later than this date, that I saw the film version in London. Starring Lawrence Harvey, David Tomlinson and the great comedian Jimmy Edwards, it was, needless to say, delightful. Cheering to see that wonderful book back in vogue...
