2008-04-29 For 'True' Book Lovers

I am not very familiar with picture books. They are not what I grew up on and am more often than not repulsed by the sort of illustrations they, well the modern ones tend to have. They are grotesque and often just insulting to a child's intelligence really. Well, "The Incredible Book Eating Boy" features illustrations which are no less conventionaly gruesome, to say the least, but blessedly not plain grotesque. It's the idea behind it, however, that gets to sparkle so! The book is 'bitten off', on the back cover. Yet the story is about anything but the carnally gluttonnous consumption of books. It is a fantastic and, simple, ingenious parody of what the world expects today from a given piece of media: that it should be understood at once without the audience actually making the effort to comprehend it. As far as fiction goes, you have people who speed through a book as if it is a race to get from cover to cover, the prime intention apparently being to accumulate as many books on the list of books they have read. As one reviewer here has mentioned, Oliver Jeffers invested time and effort into creating this volume. Any good volume is a product of much deliberation; to believe that one has read it if the reading does not even take one tenth of the time it took to craft the material is sheer simplicity in the most imbecile manner.

Granted, this moral is rather abstract for the intended child audience. Yet it should be clear at least that the story is pointing out the value of careful reading as a away to consume books. But Jeffers must have realized that his intended audience actually will comprise also of an adult who's reading the book with the child. If the grown-up understands it, then the child will hopefully one way or another be taught to treat books as not just printed pages, be it to be waded through or wantonly disposed of.