Why waste your time on social media when you could be flicking through picture books? | Joel Snape | TheBriefWire
Why waste your time on social media when you could be flicking through picture books? | Joel Snape
Published 5 August 2026 ¡ general
From histories of opera to compendiums of mosses, theyâre beautiful, expertly written and donât leave you feeling grubby. Whatâs not to like? There are lots
From histories of opera to compendiums of mosses, theyâre beautiful, expertly written and donât leave you feeling grubby. Whatâs not to like? There are lots of reasons not to read picture books. You canât really mark them âdoneâ in the same way you might, say, tick A Tale of Two Cities off your bucket list, or add them to your tally when youâre humble-bragging about what youâve read over the past 12 months.
They arenât going to become part of the cultural zeitgeist, like Middlemarch or The Odyssey, and you probably wonât be able to persuade a book
group to talk about them. Recently, though, Iâve been getting back into them in a big way, poking around the âoversizedâ shelves of my local
charity shops, cooing over large-format collections of Hokusai prints in Waterstones. Continue reading...
Published: August 5, 2026 ⢠7:30 PM IST ¡ Updated: August 5, 2026 ⢠8:40 PM ISTBy TheBriefWire Editorial Team
Key points
From histories of opera to compendiums of mosses, theyâre beautiful, expertly written and donât leave you feeling grubby.
There are lots of reasons not to read picture books.
You canât really mark them âdoneâ in the same way you might, say, tick A Tale of Two Cities off your bucket list, or add them to your tally when youâre humble-bragging about what youâve read over the past 12 months.
They arenât going to become part of the cultural zeitgeist, like Middlemarch or The Odyssey, and you probably wonât be able to persuade a book group to talk about them.
Recently, though, Iâve been getting back into them in a big way, poking around the âoversizedâ shelves of my local charity shops, cooing over large-format collections of Hokusai prints in Waterstones.
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