4/5
Books

Innumerable books show us the enormous pleasure to be had in reading, listening to stories and looking at pictures! A vast gamut of characters – bears, ducks or any type of human being – lead to the surprising, often magical, meeting with the book, an object with paper pages, cover, title and words.

Sometimes books contain only images, like the extraordinary illustrations of an elephant engrossed in a book that has fallen from the sky in the wordless Het Boek, by the famous Dutch artists Ronald and Marije Tolman, who after travelling to Argentina, decided to make this tribute to reading.

Sergio Ruzzier’s delightful picturebook This Is Not a Picture Book! shows us an angry duckling, as yet unable to read, getting very cross about the absence of pictures in a book. Gradually, we see him learning step-by-step, one word after another, as he enters the marvellous enchanted world of reading.

Dan Yaccarino’s I Am a Story underlines the enjoyment and importance of sharing stories as he takes us on a journey where words evoke images that fluctuate in time and space. Reading and the joy of reading is a theme that recurs in every corner of the world, from Europe to the Americas, from Taiwan to Australia, and from China to Japan. In To Read or Not to Read, Jimmy Liao raises the important question of reading in our world today.