World Book Day

World Book Day is a charity event held annually in the United Kingdom and Ireland on the first Thursday in March, to promote reading.  To that end, every child in full-time education in the UK is given a voucher to be spent on books and schools often have costume days.  They have this year - Dude has gone in as Michaelangelo, from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and he's taken his latest Snoopy book to read.

People across the country are celebrating and I think it's a terrific idea - what's not to love about promoting the simple, but incredibly rewarding, experience of reading?

On Twitter, people are posting #shelfies and, since I'm all for pictures on the blog, here are two of mine, taken this morning.

My Three Investigators and others shelf.  The shelf with Morph on holds all the books I collected originally, the shelf below it holds my "second" collection - hardbacks, format A's and the format B duplicates.  Behind them is my collection of cheap, cheerful and occasionally sleazy 70s and 80s paperbacks.  The bottom shelf is very narrow, so holds a variety of items - some of my Far Side collection and VHS copies of some of the (ultra) low budget horror films I made in the early 90s.

My main horror/thriller bookcase.  The nice thing for me is, if you look at the middle shelf, you'll see a lot of books written by friends of mine, which I think is excellent.  The NEL paperback of "Carrie" is out because that's my next read.

As I've started collecting the Coronet paperbacks of Peanuts from the 70s and 80s, Dude has decided he wants to as well and is reading and enjoying them.  I'm pleased with the fact that he's an eager reader.

Taken last weekend, Dude is reading his latest Snoopy collection.  That's me on the right, sat in a B&B in Bridlington in 1988, reading my latest horror anthology purchase.

Go out, pick up a book and give it a read.

For more information, go to the World Book Day site here