Tag Archives: Books

Unknown's avatar

A question about pictures in books

by

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

Unknown's avatar

Attention grabbing – the first sentence

by

There are two reasons for this postcard today. The first is a course I did looking at the opening lines in children’s literature, and the second is a headline I heard on today’s news.

I’ll start with the headline. This is from The Straits Times: “US military asks for help finding its lost stealth jet” Losing a stealth jet? Of course I want to know happens next.

It’s the same with the first sentence of each of these novels, picked from the bookcase a few minutes ago.

“Wilson sat on the balcony of the Bedford Hotel with his bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork.” The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene

“I discovered the hiding place because the ball ended up there.” The Day Before Happiness by Erri De Luca

“I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice – not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.” a prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

“Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly.” The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante

“At 7.45 on the morning of November 28, 1931, a young woman in the first stage of labour was handed by her husband into Lismore’s only hackney-car.” Wheels within Wheels – The Making of a Traveller by Dervla Murphy

“There is a fish in the mirror.” This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga

For me, each of the above is like a keyhole, giving a glimpse and tempting me to step inside and close the door.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

Unknown's avatar

The places a book can take you

by

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