Category Archives: Viewpoint

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A question about pictures in books

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Why do pictures fade away as our reading improves?

Go into a book shop and the magic of children’s books is there, tucked into its special section, layered with illustrations and worlds to explore. However, if you’re not a child or buying for a child, what are you doing there? You must trudge round to the fiction and non-fiction shelves, and choose a book of only words from the volumes of text around you. No pictures for you. No books with little islands for you to rest on and get your bearings. No. No! You would-be-island-hopper, you must choose undaunted, and get to the other side the hard way … word by word.

And what’s on the other side? More books without pictures. All the ones with colour and sketches, doodles and drawings are on the junior shelves far away, almost out of sight. How bleak is that? And what if you choose to swim back again, back to the picture books? Well that’s embarrassing. But, you could, if you really, really, really wanted.

Isn’t this tough reading regime a teeny bit wrong? Couldn’t all books have at least a few pictures? Shouldn’t they tempt us, allow us to enjoy the screen time break, the layers of magic, with no shame attached? Give us a mini-holiday – a mental, emotional, more accessible mind massage?

Just a thought.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

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Ukraine – filling our news today

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There has been a lot about Ukraine in our news recently. The country is never forgotten, but I’ve heard and seen its name a little more often over the last day or two. The difficulty is that when the media spotlight sharpens its focus, it’s hard to look, and hard to look away.

The human cost of this war is truly shocking, and the price is being paid by both sides. Already there are thousands of bereaved families and thousands of amputees, and yet still bodies are flung towards each other, tasked with the deadly burden of advancing.

As I carry on with my daily niffnaff far from Ukraine, I struggle to imagine these blood-soaked lands, Ukraine’s and others, where bombs fall into buildings, soldiers serve, families crumble, and so many brutalised bodies lose their minds. How is it that we are all under the same sky, and yet we are unable to co-exist in peace and respect?

Should we not listen to each other a little harder? Try to hear each other a little better? Force ourselves to keep our attention nailed to the hope that evenutally our compassion might prove stronger than our greed, our pride, our cruelty?

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

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The places a book can take you

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The more I think about books the more amazing I find them.

Take these two. I haven’t opened them yet but I know their pages will be filled with lines of print, and that as soon as I begin to read them I’ll be transported to places and times of which I know barely anything. I also know that if you picked up the same books you’d travel to the same places, and the worlds you’d find would be similar, but not identical to the ones I find. And both of our discoveries would be different to the ones the authors set out to describe, but we’d all experience an exchange of ideas, and ways of seeing the world.

That’s the strange power of reading. Hopefully we’ll never be without it, nor the time it takes to understand words. Video and voice are tempting, and better suited to our fragmented lives, but it would be such a loss if they drowned out the time it takes to read, to think, to care, and to try to understand where we are heading.

If we lose all that, the only writing left might be the writing on the wall.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023