‘Dear parents, a reminder that we are dressing up for World Book Day! Don’t forget your child should come to school in costume as their favourite character tomorrow…’
It’s the email every parent dreads receiving. (Or one of them, anyway.) It tends to be opened at eight o’clock the evening before World Book Day, to be met with feelings of exasperation, desperation and guilt.
Dressing up is, in fact, the antithesis to reading for pleasure
How is it that the charity World Book Day, founded by Unesco in 1995 with the laudable mission ‘to promote reading for pleasure’, has morphed into yet another occasion for parents to buy stuff? An unscientific survey of parents I know revealed that almost all of them are too busy and/or too broke to see World Book Day costumes as anything other than the last thing they need. Mothers desperately draw Harry Potter scars on their sons’ foreheads or struggle to create Pippi Longstocking plaits. There’s a hasty purchasing of polyester Gangsta Granny or Mary Poppins costumes, and then the guilt of unnecessary waste. The only thing any of this imparts to a child is that books mean trouble.
Dressing up is, in fact, the antithesis to reading for pleasure. When your nose is in a book, your eyes are set on a new horizon. It isn’t so much that you are imagining Oliver Twist asking for more, Harry Potter seeking Horcruxes or Lyra conversing with her daemon, when you are truly reading for pleasure, you are doing these things yourself: you somehow enter the world of the book. Good books enable you to feel like their characters; looking like them is a red herring.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that the protagonists of many great children’s books tend to be somewhat nondescript in appearance.
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