World Book Day 2023

 It's World Book Day, and some of our staff have put together a list of their favourite books and characters to celebrate.

Kate Miltner - Lecturer in Data, AI and Society

"One of my favorite book characters is Eloise from Eloise by Kay Thompson. She's funny, adventurous, imaginative, and certainly keeps the adults around her on their toes. As a child growing up in the suburbs of New York City, I couldn't imagine a better life than having the full run of The Plaza hotel to myself!"

Itzelle Medina Perea - Postdoctoral Researcher

"Three of my favourite books are Lanny by Max Porter, Our Share of the Night by Mariana Enriquez and A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende. The last two are by female Latin American authors, originally published in Spanish but translated into English."

Harriet Godfrey-Holmes - Departmental Manager

"Dido Twite from Joan Aiken's wonderful Wolves Chronicles books was a childhood hero for me -  a plucky child who travelled the world, making friends, having adventures and saving the King! A whole series that I devoured (although she didn't actually appear in the first book The Wolves of Willoughby Chase)."

Peter Bath - Professor of Health Informatics and Applied Health Data Analytics

"My favourite non-fiction books is My Life with Martin Luther King Junior by Coretta Scott King. This is the biography of the civil rights campaigner in the 1950s and 1960s, described by his wife. The book contains memorable descriptions of him as a person and of his activities leading the US civil rights movement. Although the description of his assassination saddened me deeply, the description of his funeral and the tributes that were made following his death are very uplifting. I was very fortunate to visit his childhood home (now a state museum, shown in the photo) in Atlanta, Georgia when I was there for a conference in 2009."

"Every Christmas I read one of Charles Dickens’s books. Dickens created over 1,000 characters in his novels and stories. Many of Dickens’s characters are vividly portrayed with fascinating personalities. Among my favourite characters is Newman Noggs, an underpaid clerk with alcohol problems who befriends his employer’s nephew, Nicholas Nickleby. Another favourite is Amy Dorrit, also known as Little Dorrit, who was born in the debtor’s prison, the Marshalsea, and looks after her father there; unlike him, she is allowed out to run errands for him and her family. Abel Magwitch is convicted criminal in Great Expectations; he is discovered by a young boy, Pip, the narrator in the novel, after Magwitch escapes from the prison ship where he is awaiting transportation. Pip grows up and leaves home but his life is completely changed by that fateful encounter in the graveyard."

Susan Oman - Lecturer in Data, AI and Society

"I love the clown from my book & animations on understanding well-being and data. Clowns are meant to entertain and make us happy, yet well-known figures like Batman’s The Joker or The Simpsons’ Krusty are sad and troubled. He represents that well-being and data are more complicated than you may think at first."