Slowly, slowly, slowly, said the sloth

This book by Eric Carle (of Very Hungry Caterpillar fame) is, yes, a children's book. I have no idea why it is on my university bookshelf, but there we go, it was, and I bemusedly gave it a read over breakfast. It's peak essay season and it's been a while since I read anything on paper other than academic philosophy or economics, so this was a very welcome change.

   The book follows a sloth's perpetual struggle to be recognised by his fellow animals as legitimately purposeful given how slowly (naturally) he does things. Slowly, he crawls along a branch, eats a leaf, falls asleep, and wakes up again. He hangs upside-down all day and night, even in the rain. A howler monkey asks him why he's so slow; a caiman why so quiet, an anteater why so boring. Finally a jaguar asks him why he is so lazy and our eponymous hero snaps. The sloth slowly thinks about a response, and then proceeds to explain (using an impressively extensive list of synonyms for 'slow') that his tranquil modes of conduct are not indicative of laziness, but of a calmer approach to life; he enjoys taking his time to think about things and do them thoroughly and carefully at an unhurried pace, so that he can better appreciate them. Quite a positive mellow message, which I found at considerable odds with my mindset as I read it - today I've finished bashing out the last 4000 words of my final economics essay, and so the whole day has been quite an unslothlike rush of effort.

   The illustrations are great; textured patches and splashes of colour making up a wide cast of rainforest animals (there's a double-page spread at the back of every animal that features), which include such exotic highlights as the tapir, armadillo, and hoatzin. Also, there's a short foreword by legendary zoologist Jane Goodall about her love for sloths. While this bit was not quite as child-readable (she goes into some depth explaining certain aspects of sloth behaviour), I as a nature-fan still found it very enjoyable and enlightening. Did you know that sloths only poo and wee once a week? And they can swim!
   Anyway. As a twenty-one year old scatterbrained eccentric I am in no real position to properly recommend children's books, but I rather liked reading this one, and as a child I was always a fan of animals and pictures, and this book has them both in delightful spades, tied together with a message for us all to slow down.