The Great Book Give Away for 2012 announced - how many have you read?

One million books will be distributed for free – from this list of 25 – for the second World Book Night which is on St George's Day  - April 23rd - 2012

I've read 12 of them (most recently The Road by Cormac McCarthy) and have to confess that there's at least three on the list I've never heard of... 

Anyone heard of all of them? 

Anyone read all of them?
The one I haven't read and must is Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle. So many people have said how good it is - her more famous book is 1001 Dalmatians.
I would recommend The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O'Farrell to anyone who hasn't read it - a great example of intelligent women's fiction. No, that's wrong. It's a great example of intelligent fiction. Full stop.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (Vintage)

The Player of Games by Iain M Banks (Little, Brown)

Sleepyhead by Mark Billingham (Little, Brown)

Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson (Transworld)

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (Harper Collins)

The Take by Martina Cole (Headline)

Harlequin by Bernard Cornwall (Harper Collins)

Someone Like You by Roald Dahl (Penguin)

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (Penguin)

Room by Emma Donoghue (Pan Macmillan)

Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier (Little, Brown)

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber)

Misery by Stephen King (Hodder)

The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella (Transworld)

Small Island by Andrea Levy (Headline)

Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist (Quercus)

The Road by Cormac McCarthy (Pan Macmillan)

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (Vintage)

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O'Farrell (Headline)

The Damned Utd by David Peace (Faber)

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman (Transworld)

How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff (Penguin)

Touching the Void by Joe Simpson (Vintage)

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (Vintage)

The Book Thief by Markus Zuzak (Transworld)

Official: Fiction is good for you

Reading stories makes you a better person. Every reader knew it: now there's proof.

The results of a Canadian university research team led by  British psychologist Keith Oatley reveal that fiction readers   are better at relationships.

"Reading about Darcy and Elizabeth or Hamlet or Harry Potter and the progress of their relationships and dilemmas gets you, the reader, practising how to understand others and how they think and behave."

This is serious stuff. Not only should the research findings bring a glow to every bookworm's pale cheeks (we always knew we were nice people), it may also offer a formula for mending Cameron's Broken Society.
Imagine it. Novels could be on (free) prescription.
Three or four books a month perhaps, taken at will, and the patient could have a completely free choice from a wide selection. 
Oh wait, we have that already - the libraries that are under threat in every corner of the country.

Proffesor Oatley's research is published in Such Stuff as Dreams - The Psychology of Fiction. He also happens to be a novelist himself...what were the chances of that?