Students, parents and staff are urged to get involved with the "Costa Book Awards" Challenge: to read as many of the shortlisted books as you can before the winners are announced on the 7th January.

 The LRGS challenge is focusing on three of the categories in the Costa Book Awards and include: Novel of the Year, Debut Novel of the Year and Children's Book of the Year. Each shortlist consists of 4 books, giving 12 books in total.

Mr Rafferty, English Teacher, is heading this campaign and said: “You can choose the scope and difficulty of your own challenge. You could go for the easy option of reading all the books in one of the categories (4 books in 47 days); The middle option of reading all the books in 2 categories (8 books in 47 days); Or the hard option of all 12 books across the 3 categories (speed reading a book every 4 days!)”

The overall aims of this challenge are to get more students reading (and enjoying it! The competitive element always helps); to get students reading more of a range of quality fiction and to get people talking about reading. This last aim will be achieved by parents and staff reading the same texts alongside students, so dialogue will take place. On the 7th January, all participants in the challenge (parents, staff and boys alike) will be invited to an event to share their thoughts and feelings about the books, deciding on our overall winners. Refreshments will be provided for this event.

Mr Rafferty added: “Hopefully, the thought of inspiring a love of literature in our students is incentive enough; however, it gets better! You get 12 books for the price of 1. As an English department, we are going to purchase a copy of each of the nominated books. In return, we ask all participants to buy just one of the books. When this has been read, it can then be brought in and exchanged for any of your unread books on the shortlist.”

One final point is that whilst the books in the Children's Book of the Year category will be appropriate for all students and parents alike, the content of some of the books on the other shortlists may be more suitable for boys in older years.

For more information about this challenge or to register your involvement, please email Mr Rafferty or have a look at the Costa Book Awards website.

Happy reading!