April 23 is World Book Day, and for years, I never did anything special about it. What was I supposed to do? Read a book? I read every single day. I do not need a designated world day to remind me to pick one up. Forgive my indifference toward rituals.

Yet somewhere underneath all that nonchalance, I knew I wanted to mark it this year. A day that exists to celebrate the very thing I love most deserves at least a little something from me.

So when I stumbled upon an event happening in Finland on that exact day, I paid attention. Seis Lukupuutto, or Stop Illiteracy in English, was a simple, beautiful act where people sitting down together on the stairs of the Parliament Building in Helsinki and reading in silence for one hour. The same gathering happened across five other Finnish cities that day: Tampere, Turku, Vaasa, Mikkeli, and Oulu. In Helsinki, the event ran in two slots: 1–2 pm and 4–5 pm.

The cause behind it is one worth taking seriously. Literacy skills in Finland are declining and most people are struggling to read. Screens eat up hours that books once filled, dragging along with them mental health struggles and learning difficulties. The absence of deep, sustained reading quietly chips away at the kind of thinking a functioning, civilized society depends on.

I found out about the event through an Instagram post by Suomalainen Kirjakauppa, a local bookstore chain. The moment I read it, I put it straight into my calendar. I almost missed it, tho. Luckily, I checked my calendar one day before so I didn’t miss it.

By the time the clock crept toward 1 pm, people began filling the Parliament steps. Young, old, and everyone in between, each carrying a book. A few could not even wait for the hour to officially start. When 1 pm arrived, the whole staircase went quiet and everyone read. Mid-session, a petition to promote literacy and reading culture among Finns was handed directly to the Minister of Education.

About the Book I Brought

I chose The Lion Women of Tehran.

An hour before the event, I had already read it, and I have to admit that the first few pages did not grab me. It felt flat, unremarkable. But I brought it anyway, tried to give it some chances to impress me. And as I sat on those steps with hundreds of strangers doing exactly what I was doing, something shifted. The more pages I turned, the more the characters pulled me in. Their conflicts, their lives, the unfolding of the plot. That one focused hour, with nothing around me but people reading and a book in my hands, gave me no room to wander. I had no phone to reach for, no reason to stop. And in that stillness, the book revealed itself to me.

Which made me think: how many books are sitting out there, genuinely worth loving, that we have already written off because we never gave them the time, the stillness, the chance to let us in?

Something to sit with, I think.

Happy World Book Day.