Library Board of Trustees Agenda and Packet 2012 09 13

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Children's Books - It's a Book - By Lane Smith - NYTimes.com Page 1 of 2 lie New ilork Itinteo Reprints This copy is for your personal, noncommercial use only. You can order presentation -ready copies for distribution to your colleagues. clients or customers here or use the "Reprints" tool that appears next to any article. Visit www.nytreprinls.com for samples and additional information. Order a reprint of this article now. October 15, 2010 iRead By ADAM GOPNIK FROM THE DIRECTORS OF f T L M SUNSHINE IT'S A BOOK In Lane Smith's new book, called, simply, "It's a Book," a Written and illustrated by Lane mouse, a jackass and a monkey — all drawn with the kind of Smith early -'6os geometric - minded stylization that requires a Unpaged. Roaring Brook Press. gentle reminder of which animal is which on the title page — $12.99. (Ages 6 and up) discover a new thing. Flat and rectangular, with a hard cover and a soft, yielding inside, it baffles the jackass, while the behatted monkey tries patiently to explain its curious technology. "Do you blog with it ?" the jackass says. "No, it's a book," the monkey explains. This only makes the donkey's exasperation keener: Where's the mouse? Does it need a password? Can you make the characters fight? Can it text, tweet, toot? No, none of that, the monkey explains, and then Monkey hands the book to Jackass, who takes it worriedly, like a nut too hard to crack. The book, it turns out, is "Treasure Island," though, wisely, this isn't explicitly announced to the reader, but must be inferred from a quotation. (In the book's single finest comic moment, the anxious jackass offers a reduced text - message version of the famous sequence he has just read: "LJS: rrr! K? loll JIM::(!:)" Then, in a memorable two -page spread, sure to be especially cherished by parents, the jackass reads the thing. A clock runs above him, counting out the hours, and his ears and eyes, with wonderful caricatural economy, express first puzzlement, then absorption and at last the special quality of readerly happiness: a mind lost in a story. Those of us for whom books are a faith in themselves — who find the notion that pixels, however ordered, could be any kind of substitute for the experience of reading in a chair with the strange thing spread open on our lap — will love this book. Though it will surely draw a laugh from kids, it will give even more pleasure to parents who have been trying to make loudly the point that Smith's book makes softly: that the virtues of a book are independent of any bells, whistles or animation it might be made to contain. That two- http : / /www.nytimes.com /2010 /10/17 /books/ review /Gopnik- t.html? r= I &pagewanted= print 7/10/2012