The Book With No Pictures by B.J. Novak

Hey, Story Seekers!

No pictures.

None. No dinosaurs. No expressive little animal faces. No chicken nuggets charging into battle.

Just words.

Sounds boring.

That's exactly what the book wants you to think.

We're exploring The Book With No Pictures by B.J. Novak, which has worked out how to make the person reading it do all the work.

Readit is already on the book's side.

"Correct."

I hadn't asked you yet.

"I know."

Book Breakdown

B.J. Novak wrote it. Nobody illustrated it.

That isn't a gap in my research. There is no illustrator, and the absence is the entire machine.

The book opens by establishing one rule: whatever is written on the page, the person reading has to say out loud.

That's the trap, and the child agrees to it before understanding what they've agreed to.

Then the book starts feeding the adult increasingly indefensible material. Nonsense sounds. Absurd declarations. A song about eating ants for breakfast. Words like BLORK and BLUURF.

There's a hippo named Boo Boo Butt, which in my professional experience is a name that ends any argument about whether a book is funny.

Before long the respectable grown-up who sat down intending to encourage literacy is making noises that would worry anyone listening from the next room.

There's no plot. No main character. No journey.

The reader is the character. The book is the antagonist. And the kid has the best seat in the house.

There's no illustrator to credit, but this isn't visually dead. The typography does the job pictures usually do. Words swell, shrink, change color, lurch across the page. The layout tells your eyes when something should be loud, tiny, reluctant or completely unhinged.

The words aren't sitting there. They're stage directions.

For teachers and librarians: Lexile 490L. Dial Books, September 30, 2014. Forty-eight pages, ages 5 to 8, grades K to 3.

No ATOS, Guided Reading level or AR data here. I couldn't verify any of it from a source I'd stand behind, so it's omitted rather than guessed.

A number one New York Times bestseller and a Goodreads Choice Award nominee the year it came out.

Jungle Jimmy's Journal

Novak has explained what he was going for, and it's the cleanest description of this book anybody has managed.

He talks about the time in a child's life when books are read to them, and how the experience is about the bond between the adult and the child as much as between the child and the book. Then this: "what if the book and the child teamed up to force the adult to say silly things?"

The book and the child, teamed up, against you.

That's the whole design, and it's why this thing works on kids who can't yet read a word of it.

A child doesn't need to understand irony or comic structure. They understand one fact immediately.

Jimmy has to say whatever the book says.

Now we have trouble.

I've spent thirty years on the other side of this and I recognize the mechanism exactly. The audience knows what's coming. The performer knows what's coming. And the comedy stops being the ridiculous thing you're about to say and becomes your visible struggle not to say it.

So stop. Stare at the page.

"No."

They lean in.

"I'm not saying that."

Now they need you to say it more than they have ever needed anything.

Look for a loophole. There isn't one. You agreed to the rules.

Say the stupid thing, Jimmy.

And underneath the nonsense there's something real about children. They almost never get power over an adult. Not actual power, comedy power. The grown-up is the one who says brush your teeth, put on your shoes, stop licking that.

This book reverses it for twelve minutes, and the kid knows precisely what's happening.

One catch, and it's the same catch as every book like this: you have to play. Read it like the terms and conditions on a software update and there's nothing here. Forty-eight pages, no pictures, good luck.

The book supplies the setup. You supply the timing.

Readit's Review

Best book ever.

That seems premature.

"No pictures means nothing distracts me from watching YOU."

Ah.

"I like when the grown-up has to say the stupid stuff."

I noticed.

"Can I make my own book?"

What would it say?

"Jimmy has to give Readit seventeen cookies."

That's not how books work.

"You said whatever the words say, you have to say."

SAY. Not do.

"Oh."

Nice try.

"Jimmy has to SAY he will give Readit seventeen cookies."

We're moving on.

What Others Think

Goodreads has it at 4.35 out of 5 from 31,976 ratings and 4,245 reviews, with 83 percent at four or five stars.

But the best evidence I found isn't a rating. It's a father named Philip who reviewed it with his three daughters in the room, transcribing them as they went.

All three voted five stars. What one of them said is the thing I keep thinking about.

Eleanor, on the opening: "I liked it at the beginning when it said, Oh no... I was like, did the book really say it, or is that just you saying it?"

That's it. That's the machine, described by a child.

She genuinely could not tell whether her dad was reading or improvising, and that uncertainty is where the entire book lives. Her sister Gwen's contribution was simpler: "It was funny when it said the hippo's name was Boo Boo Butt."

Years later Eleanor played her dad a recording she'd kept of him reading it to them. On the tape they are all cracking up. He wrote that it was really, really sweet to listen to.

That's a book doing more than getting a laugh.

Now the honest part, because this book has real detractors and one of them makes an argument worth hearing.

Reviewer karen, who gave it three stars, points out that the children young enough to howl at GLUURR GA-WOCKO MA GRUMPH-A-DOO are pretty much exactly the children who would also enjoy having a picture to look at, and wonders why we're in a hurry to move them past that.

I think she has a point, and I'd answer it this way: this isn't a replacement for picture books. It's a stunt, and stunts are allowed. Novak has said he likes the idea that it might be the first book without pictures a child ever meets, and that it could get them wondering what's inside all the other books that don't have any.

As an on-ramp, that's a good argument.

The other criticism is purely practical and you should take it seriously. Miranda Reads: "it's a performance piece... there's an expectation for excitement and high energy. It's very difficult to read in a soothing way, so it might get hidden for nights that require a bit of finesse to get the little one down."

Correct. I would not deploy this at 8:29 if the objective is unconscious children by 8:30.

This book has other plans for your evening.

Belly Laugh Scale

5 out of 5: Laugh-Out-Loud Legend

No hesitation. This is what the five is for.

The humor isn't sitting next to the reading experience. The reading experience is the joke, and there's no way to encounter this book passively.

The kid watches an adult get trapped by words. The adult gets pauses, resistance, embarrassment and a hippo named Boo Boo Butt.

And the evidence isn't people calling it cute. It's three sisters voting five stars in unison, a kid who couldn't tell whether the book or her father said "oh no," and a recording of the whole family laughing that was worth keeping for years.

Five out of five. Laugh-Out-Loud Legend.

Don't blame me when they ask for it again immediately.

Final Explorer Verdict

Ages 5 to 8, and near the top of the pile for any kid who thinks books are boring.

That's genuinely my favorite thing about it. Look at the cover. No pictures? A child can only conclude that somebody has made a serious mistake.

Then the words start misbehaving, and the thing they expected to be dull turns out to be the funniest object in the house. That reversal is worth a lot, and it's why this sits on my reluctant readers list.

I wouldn't pick it for a child who wants an actual story with characters and an adventure. There isn't one, and pretending otherwise sets everybody up to be disappointed.

I wouldn't pick it when the room needs to get calmer.

And I wouldn't hand it to a grown-up who refuses to look silly, because in their hands it's forty-eight blank-ish pages.

But give it to the right reader and you have a book that doesn't just ask to be read aloud. It conscripts the adult and makes them part of the act.

Worth noting: three of the funniest books I've reviewed this week were written by professional television comedy writers. Novak came from The Office. It shows in the timing, and it shows in how much of the work is left for the performer.

Which makes the bridge to my own shelf an easy one. How To Make Your Sock Talk approaches performance from the other end. This book turns the adult into a performer whether they consented or not. Sock Talk teaches the kid to become one on purpose.

Same pleasure underneath. Words get a lot more fun when somebody brings them to life.

Readit?

"BLUURF."

We're done.

"BLORK."

Review's over.

"Jimmy has to give Readit seventeen cookies."

Nice try.

Keep exploring, Story Seekers!

Jungle Jimmy & Readit