Thursday, March 10, 2011

World Book Day

On the 3rd of March, i.e. this time last week, it was World Book Day in the United Kingdom. If you've lived in the UK when you were 18 or younger, you'll probably be familiar with it. WBD is a non-governmental initiative organized by UNESCO and aimed at promoting reading. It also functions as a fund raising event for Book Aid International and Readathon- the latter is an organization that organizes sponsored readathons, as the name might suggest. They're super fun- I did one in my first year of high school and got some sort of prize for reading the greatest number of books in a month. The sad thing was that I don't think I was even reading any more than usual! ;)

In the UK at least, every child is given a £1 book voucher which they can either spend towards a book of their choice or use to buy one of several special £1 books released every year. These have been done by several prominent authors- in 2005 one of them was 'The Creature in the Case' by Garth Nix, an Old Kingdom short story.

In some schools (including mine), kids dress up as a character from a book. My responsibilities in school include being 'School Photographer' which means I get to photograph events such as these- and there were some seriously awesome costumes this year. I can't share them, but we did have Cruella de Vil with a good number of Dalmations, Hornblower, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. One of my friends even dressed up as the Very Hungry Caterpillar, complete with flashing LED antennae.

Me? I got my leather on and dressed up as a Shadowhunter from Cassandra Clare's Mortal Instruments series. Complete with awesome runes done by an arty friend of mine.


Sadly I didn't get a full length photo that shows my leather leggings and boots combination, but you'll have to take my word that it was pretty cool. :)

Does anyone else participate in World Book Day? It's run on the 23rd of April everywhere else in the world, so you still have time to get organized! It's always a lot of fun, and I think that fellow book bloggers would agree that much of what we try to do with our reviews is to encourage people to read. Even if you're not planning on taking part, if you could, who would you dress up as?

lale

5 comments:

  1. What an awesome day! World Book Day sounds like so much fun. Love your runes. :) If I could dress up as any character, it would be Ellie from Angelfire. Who wouldn't want to walk around with cool swords?! :)

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  2. What a great idea to give every child £1. Sounds like a good use of government dollars.
    I'd probably dress up as Hermione - boring, but I'm not into costumes.
    New follower!

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  3. omg the whole dress-up-as-a-book-character sounds awesome. the whole shadowhunter getup looks awesome :D the face part, anyway.

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  4. How fun! Too bad there's no pic but glad you had a great time!

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  5. I love your runes and that Very Hungry Caterpillar costume sounds awesome too! World Book day sounds like a ton of fun! :)

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