The Book That No One Wanted to Read

Product Information

Now I want to say here that Ayoade is in fact incorrect, this is NOT the first book to use this technique. John Agard also wrote a book narrated by a book, My Name is Book, also aimed at children, so this claim is not actually true.

He asks us what's underneath our covers? What are we actually like? ( I love how he's making us go deeper, into ourselves to dig more into who we are, inside.)It’s “sort of” a story, but it’s more just a conversation with the book about books! What bookworm wouldn’t love that?! The irony is that, just as the book says, I would have ignored this on the shelf because of the cover if it hadn’t been sent to me for a review - so I have to urge to be better than me and go out and buy it for yourself, cover and all.

From actor-author-broadcaster-comedian-filmmaker Richard Ayoade comes a book narrated by . . . a book. Quirky, smart, and genre-busting, this is the saga of a book that nobody wants to read—until the day it meets YOU. This book is so hilarious and weird. It goes off on these crazy tangents with silly jokes before finally getting to the actual story, and then it veers off into another wild tangent. I love it! The story was not at all what I expected. Us books need to be seen. We need to be held. We need to be heard. I think that's why children make the best readers, because they know that these things are also true of them.**” This was my first book from Richard Ayoade. I didn’t know anything about him until someone told me that he has other funny books too and I can certainly vouch for that with this one! The Book that No One Wanted to Read is slim, nondescript, corduroy coloured and hidden in the Miscellany section of the library. It likes it that way. It muses on libraries, readers and books, on why we select some books. After all ‘ They say you should never judge a book by its cover. But how else can you decide whether you might like it?’ Then again, what is a book? Is it invisible, really? After all, no-one really knows what’s inside in truth until they’re chosen.It’s a book written by a book which ‘manipulatively’ makes us part of its “social experiment” (in a good way). The book would ask its reader to be in an imaginative situation where the reader would find a talking book, which thought that nobody wanted to read it. The book and the bookfinder would then engage in funny and silly conversations. I am not going to spoil anything else because it wouldn’t be fun then. Yet what if this book, that is entirely happy in its own space, might be disturbed? Then again, what if this brave child is undeterred when she hears a voice in her head, suggesting that she should ‘look at the other books. They’re far more interesting’? Might this lead her to investigate elsewhere? Then again, might the telepathic conversation lead her out of the library, or at least the Miscellany section? I love the opening lines where it states how so many say we shouldn't judge a book by its cover, to which he rightly says, "but how else can you decide whether you might like it?" I found this to be an ambitious and enjoyable read. The premise was clever and made me laugh a few times. This is a work of fiction that is aware of its own fictionality. The book is about a book that no one wants to read, and it explores the concept of how a book can be interesting even if no one wants to read it. Books can contain stories or facts about, and therefore be, virtually anything you can think of, but have you ever considered what a book might think about and feel? One neglected book in The Book That No One Wanted to Read, by Richard Ayoade and illustrated by Tor Freeman, has a chance to change its destiny when a reader encounters it and pulls it from a hiding spot on a high shelf, offering it a new future.