[Infowarrior] - “It’s a Book”

[Richard Forno]

Children’s Books

iRead


From “It’s a Book”
By ADAM GOPNIK

Published: October 15, 2010

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/books/review/Gopnik-t.html
 
In Lane Smith’s new book, called, simply, “It’s a Book,” a mouse, a jackass and a monkey — all drawn with the kind of early-’60s geometric-minded stylization that requires a gentle reminder of which animal is which on the title page — discover a new thing. Flat and rectangular, with a hard cover and a soft, yielding inside, it baffles the jackass, while the behatted monkey tries patiently to explain its curious technology. “Do you blog with it?” the jackass says. “No, it’s a book,” the monkey explains. This only makes the donkey’s exasperation keener: Where’s the mouse? Does it need a password? Can you make the characters fight? Can it text, tweet, toot? No, none of that, the monkey explains, and then Monkey hands the book to Jackass, who takes it worriedly, like a nut too hard to crack.

The book, it turns out, is “Treasure Island,” though, wisely, this isn’t explicitly announced to the reader, but must be inferred from a quotation. (In the book’s single finest comic moment, the anxious jackass offers a reduced text-message version of the famous sequence he has just read: “LJS: rrr! K? lol!

JIM: : ( ! : )”

Then, in a memorable two-page spread, sure to be especially cherished by parents, the jackass reads the thing. A clock runs above him, counting out the hours, and his ears and eyes, with wonderful caricatural economy, express first puzzlement, then absorption and at last the special quality of readerly happiness: a mind lost in a story.

Those of us for whom books are a faith in themselves — who find the notion that pixels, however ordered, could be any kind of substitute for the experience of reading in a chair with the strange thing spread open on our lap — will love this book. Though it will surely draw a laugh from kids, it will give even more pleasure to parents who have been trying to make loudly the point that Smith’s book makes softly: that the virtues of a book are independent of any bells, whistles or animation it might be made to contain. That two-page spread of the jackass simply reading is the key moment in the story, and one of the nicest sequences in recent picture books.

For in trying to make the case for books to our kids, exactly the case we want to make is not that they can compete with the virtues of computer or screens, but that they do something else: that they allow for a soulfulness the screens, with their jumpy impersonality, cannot duplicate — any more than the movies can duplicate the intimate intensity of theater, or than the computer can reproduce the shared-hearth-in-living-room experience of television that we now, ironically, recall nostalgically. (“Would you please get off your computer and come and watch television with the rest of the family,” I’ve found myself calling out to my own plugged-in children.)

The moral of Smith’s book is the right one: not that screens are bad and books are good, but that what books do depends on the totality of what they are — their turning pages, their sturdy self- sufficiency, above all the way they invite a child to withdraw from this world into a world alongside ours in an activity at once mentally strenuous and physically still.

The only flaw this gentle and pointed book contains, in truth, is a too-easy joke on the last page at the expense of the converted burro. But one can glide by the false note, or at least talk it over as it’s read — after all, it’s a book.

Adam Gopnik is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of a new book, “The Steps Across the Water.”