Time: World Book Night: Which Titles Will Be Given Away in 2013?

When they meet, they sit around a wooden table draped in red cloth. Their deliberations are secret. And the choices they make may affect the lives of thousands. No, this is not the clandestine panel to select the next Archbishop of Canterbury. It is the World Book Night U.K. & Ireland Editorial Committee, which this autumn spent six weeks agonizing over their choice of 20 books that will be distributed by the thousands on April 23, 2013. Made up of 17 editors, authors, librarians and laypeople, the committee selects 20 books that 20,000 volunteers will give away 20 copies of to whomever they choose - including schoolchildren, hospital patients and prisoners - as part of a worldwide initiative to spark a love of reading in those who may currently rank the activity on a par with eating steamed spinach. (Charity partners and institutions will distribution an additional 100,000 books.) (MORE: NaNoWriMo: Is National Novel Writing Month a Literary Threat or Menace?) So how does the committee choose? It's all a bit hush-hush. "Picking the World Book Night books is a little bit like laws and sausages," says Julia Kingsford, the CEO of World Book Night. "You don't necessarily want the general public to know how they're made." This much, however, we do know: On Sept. 5 the panel met for the first time in the top-floor gallery of the venerable Foyles Bookshop in Central London. As the afternoon sun shone through the large windows, casting a warm glow on the wood-beamed ceilings, the committee took their places around a table and stared at a list, compiled from public suggestions, that was thousands of titles long. But this was no direct democracy. The committee takes the public's ideas into account, but much like the U.S. electoral college, it reserves the right to make up its own mind. It didn't take long for the disagreements to begin. "We deliberately pick people who are so passionate that there are going to be moments where somebody says, "We absolutely have to have this book,' and somebody else says, "Over
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