The Book With No Pictures

This is a book for children by B. J. Novak (yep, Ryan (and also one of the writers and producers) from The Office, he's an incredibly skilled comedy writer I'll have you know). I visited home today and my mum showed me it, saying that it had recently made a member of its target audience (i.e. a child) become so overtaken with laughter that it proved an utterly ineffectual bedtime read, as they couldn't sleep for a while due to laughing. This sounded funny, and I've heard of B. J. Novak's prowess as a writer (obviously, from his part in one of the best comedy shows of all time, and his collection of short stories that I read about a quarter of in a bookshop in France last summer but I didn't have any money and eventually the owner realised I was just reading it without paying and told me to leave).

   So, this book; it's designed for parents to read to young children so as to entertain them, and of course, most of those kind of books have pictures. This one doesn't. Of course that doesn't make it any less interesting or fun to have read to you though, as the 'rules' of reading books to kids dictate that grown-ups have to read out aloud whatever it says on the pages. As such, Novak exploits the situation to the full, throwing the grown-up reader into fits of inexorable ridicule for the entertainment of the child, who of course will delight far more in seeing their parental figures descend helplessly into silliness at the hands of a book than they ever would from just having pictures in that book. How?
   By being playful and inventive with the words he puts onto the page. Who says a book needs to be a story? Can't it just be conversational, not even necessarily about something, just a string of statements that together lead one on a roughly-enjoyable verbal romp? Well, yes, because that's exactly what this book is. Novak's book forces the grown-up to declare exceedingly silly things, try to pronounce and vocalise bizarre onomatopoeic noises, to wonder aloud why they are doing so, and to exasperatedly decry the sheer silliness of the book for making them do all these things. It completely disempowers the reader for the benefit of the read-to, and it does so in a disarmingly simple and charming and fun way. I had fits of giggles just trying to read it aloud to myself, never mind to a child, though I might have to try that at some point, because that's what it's for.

   This book is fantastic, a wondrous feat of creative cheek that might just (and I hope I does so) spark something in the lives of the children being read it, showing them the fluidity of language and the fun one can have with having control of it; this is a book that might give little kids that first push into a deeper understanding of semantic and pragmatic language use, making them grow up to be better readers, better speakers, better thinkers. Maybe that's an overly-complicated side-effect, and the main point is just to turn the typical bedtime reading ritual into something a bit more unpredictable and amusing, but that's definitely something that may well come of this book, and for it and for the book itself I applaud B. J. Novak wholeheartedly.

   If you need a new book to read to a child aged three to seven (ish? I dunno, child development isn't perfectly consistent), then I can't recommend this one enough.