Degrees of Affection

After seeing some of the lovely illustrations from this book on Olga Godim's post, I had to see if my library had this. The title alone ensured I had to read this.

As a poetry book, it's a lovely picture book.

Seriously, most of these pictures are quite lovely, though some remind me of the ugly 90's pictures from books like The Stinky-Cheese Man. Some were so touching though and a couple I wouldn't mind hanging on my wall.

The poetry...I don't know. I would have thought that poetry concerning books would have been just my cup of tea. But really, none of them completely worked for me and many didn't work at all. The ones that I liked the "best" were: What If Books Had Different Names?; Great, Good, Bad

(boy I can think of a few books the last line describes perfectly); Are You a Book Person? (so-so); A Classic (because of what it reminds me of and the Picture!); and the title poem though the last two lines were not nearly as cute as I think they were meant to be.

Mostly though, they were just "blah". I read them to LL when we were driving back from the library - yes it went that quickly - and he greeted basically all of them with varying degrees of Ugh. For many of them, that sums them up nicely.

I really wanted to like this book and there are a couple of poems I want to remember. But mostly, I liked flipping through the pictures and then setting it aside. We also found it largely forgettable; I've had to read this a couple times to remember how I felt about each one.

Great, Good, Bad

“A great book is a homing device
For navigating paradise.

A good book somehow makes you care
About the comfort of a chair.

A bad book owes to many trees
A forest of apologies.”