In celebration of World Book Day, the W&A website team share their favourite reads.
Clare
Editorial & Communities Manager
Reading Noughts & Crosses by Malorie Blackman when it was first published in 2005 was one of the most formative experiences of my life. I'd not long turned twelve and I devoured this book in a day, holed up in my bedroom until being called down for dinner. Malorie Blackman's masterpiece is set in an alternative 21st-century Britain where the Crosses, the black ruling elite, control society and the Noughts, the white underclass. The heart of this book is a forbidden love between childhood friends Sephy and Callum. We witness their relationship play out against the backdrop of a dystopian London and Blackman shows the absurdity of racism by reversing history, playing on reader's assumptions and unconscious biases.
Once I'd finished, I read it again, and then shoved it into my mum's hands to read. We talked about the story for days after and as each new book in the series was published, we carried on the same pattern, reading and talking. I return to Noughts & Crosses most years. It showed me the power of books and how a story can change your entire world for the better.
One of my favourite books now is Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. It is a book that is worthy, and then some, of all of the hype surrounding it. Sam and Sadie meet as kids in the games room of a hospital, bonding over their mutual love of Super Mario Bros while Sadie visits her ill sister and Sam recovers from a car crash that killed his mother and permanently injured his leg. We are with Sam and Sadie at every stage of their lives, Zevin granting the readers a front seat to the ebbs and flows of not just their friendship, but their creative partnership as game creators. You don't need to be a gamer to read and enjoy this book. You just need to be human and believe in the infinite possibilities that life and imagination can spawn. So, yes, that's basically everyone in the world and I stand by it. Every single human needs to read this book.
Amelia
Events Manager
One of the books that I remember vividly from my childhood was Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant. The copy we had was illustrated by Michael Foreman and Freire Wright and was a landscape paperback that you could put across your knees. It tells the story of a giant with a beautiful garden who builds a high wall around it to keep the local children from roaming his orchards and climbing his trees. But the cold weather comes to nest in their place and his garden is plunged into an eternal winter until he is able to open his heart and his home again. It’s a tender story about a lonely man whose life goes from empty to full because of one child. It’s a reminder that beauty is better shared and life is better lived with people. I haven’t read it for, maybe, fifteen years but I still remember the face of the giant, children with small limbs around branches, blossom falling.
One of my favourite books now is In the Dreamhouse by Carmen Maria Machado. It is a memoir about a difficult and psychologically abusive relationship told through so many different forms that are as surprising and playful as the subject is raw and powerful. She talks about the pressure queer writers often face to write good queer people, in the face of a lack of queer representation, in the face of rampant homophobia and transphobia. But we do not always fall in love with good queer people. It is the sort of book that breaks you in half and then puts you back together again, healing you in the process. It was a book I needed and a book I will read again and again for the rest of my life.
James
Product Manager
My parents weren’t big readers so, while it would be an exaggeration to state there were no books in my house growing up, it'd be fair enough to say they didn't make for a natural fit. Which isn’t to say my parents didn’t read to me, or encourage reading. In fact, reading to my own kids at bedtime now brings back memories of Meg and Mog, The Jolly Postman and Funnybones before drifting off to sleep. But, on the whole, books were something that belonged to school and to the library. And an unintentional result of this was that it made the act of reading something that was to be done and not something to be enjoyed. So it’s for this reason that I’m choosing Mr Bump by Roger Hargreaves as a favourite book. Not for its literary merit (although making your reader laugh is hard so kudos where it's due!) or because it’s an all-time favourite but because my grandma gave it to me and so it was mine and I read it to myself silently in the car on the York scenic road in the last light of the day and I enjoyed it (not just the story but having read it by myself) so much that when I looked up we were already home and mum said “You read that all by yourself, didn’t you?” and I said “Yes,” and she said “Now you can read any book you want to.”
And for a book that I’ve loved of late, I’m going to choose one that I finished a couple of weeks ago: Treacle Walker by Alan Garner. He’s such a unique writer and it’s another of his books that I’d happily get lost in again. I love how he plays with language yet not a word is wasted; how his characters, wherever they take you, always matter; how his stories are otherworldly yet so obviously rooted in a landscape we recognise; and how he can move so deftly between faintly comedic/ridiculous scenes and those that are imbued with a real and desperate sadness. Like with a lot of his other books, Treacle Walker is multi-layered, with myth, as well as the human relationship with – and perception of – time and place being prominent themes, but the pace and playful nature of the language doesn’t make this overbearing. If reading fiction is about the stirring of emotions, about transporting readers to another place, and about relaying ideas that live beyond the page then for my money this book does this in spades, and all in just 150 pages.
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