I saw this book on the shelf while I was looking for Nabokov's Lolita - M being close to N and all that. And it looked so cool. I was intrigued by the flaps, and then when I realized that underneath the flaps was the first page instead of another cover page, I was pretty much sold. I didn't even read past the first page or the back of the book - I totally judged a book by its cover. But can you blame me? Just look at it!
Almost every other page is an illustration, and the font is pretty big, so it was a super short read. It would have been even shorter if I didn't take a few moments to absorb every illustration - but there was pretty much no way I wasn't going to study each illustration.
The book is about a young boy who gets lead through a strange labyrinth in the basement of his public library. I honestly don't want to say much more than that because the book is so short that the journey through the labyrinth takes up nearly half the book. But it's..... weird. It escalated from "hm, okay, this book is getting started" to "HOLY CRAP this book is weird" in less than 20 pages (out of 96).
I don't think I really understood it. I mean, I was easily able to follow what was happening, but... I feel like there must be more to this book. A high school English teacher would probably go crazy over it and force their students to write a 10-page essay on what they think was actually happening to the boy or if the boy was even real or if this book actually exists (because, let's face it, high school English teachers make up so much that they might as well make up an entire book).
Anyway, it was a pretty neat book. I'd recommend it to anyone who likes cool illustrations or really weird books or very pretty books. Because it was very pretty. There was a character who didn't have a voice and spoke with her hands, and her dialogue was printed in blue. I liked that a lot.
Being so short and odd, there wasn't much that truly resonated with me, but there was one quote at the beginning that I liked. The boy had asked for some books, and when the old man brought them to him, he told the boy (yeah, nobody had actual names in this book) that they couldn't be checked out and he'd have to read them in a special Reading Room. The boy wanted to go home because his mother would worry, but the old man got so angry about having gone to the trouble of getting the books for the boy that he agreed to stay and read for a half hour. Then the boy thought to himself:
"Why do I act like this, agreeing when I really disagree, letting people force me to do things I don't want to do?" (p 21)
Oh, little boy, how well I know how you feel. OH WAIT I THINK THAT THE BOY'S ANXIETY KIND OF MAKES THE WHOLE BOOK INTO A SYMBOL OF HOW PEOPLE WITH ANXIETY ACT IN ORDER TO AVOID DISPLEASING OTHERS. Have you ever been at a party and kind of wanted to leave but didn't want to seem rude so you ended up being the very last person to leave? And the whole time you just felt trapped under these societal pressures to be social and polite and seem normal? I would say with about 65% confidence that what happens to the boy in the Reading Room is a symbolic representation of that feeling. Ha, take that high school English teachers, I could write a good three or four pages about that!
So now I have two other books that I got from the library last week. One of them is my banned book, and the other may or may not be the book that I abandoned at some point. I'll explain that when I write my blog post for that part of the challenge! In the mean time, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child releases in 42 days and 10 hours. I'm so excited for my book that was published this year ahh!
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