The so-called tall, dark & handsome boy
As far as I can remember, the first book that I bought was “Oh Bother, Someone is Jelaous”. No, it’s not a love story, actually it’s a children’s book featuring Winnie the Pooh and his (he’s not a girl) friends. The book was only 20 pages or so: I think the story can fit in a couple yellow papers (back and forth) and the rest were colored drawings.
The next book I bought (again, as far as I can remember) was the Lion King. The book was also thin and if you’ll scan it, you will see that there are lots of illustrations compared to the text which can fit in half a dozen of yellow paper (back and forth).
But as I grew older the books that I read have only limited illustrations some don’t have illustration even just a doodle.
I can still remember some of my classmates half a decade ago asking me if I can stick to reading “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” because it has only one illustration for every chapter. I told them that I can! On the other hand, they said to me that it’s very impossible for them to read such book with only a few numbers of illustrations.
During my childhood days, I thought I will never read a book that has no illustrations. Apparently, I was wrong. A book does not need illustrations to be a bestselling book. It’s all in the contents and gist of the book. Just like in a blog site, it’s not really necessary to have a fancy layout; it’s the thought that counts. Most of you already know about this: I don’t read useless blogs (most blogs written in Tagalog are like this) even though their layouts make me go “wow”.
Okay, back to my point… I don’t know if you’ll agree with me but I think illustrations are another kind of spoilers. I know, they’ll useless and you’ll not get too much information from them unless you read the book. They only give you some ideas what is going to happen. I don’t know if this one is only true for me: they also somehow affect your imagination: Let’s pretend that you’re reading a book called “The Tall, Dark and Handsome Boy” (okay, you’ll never see a book bearing this title because I’m the one who thought of it. If it happened that you searched amazon or somewhere or you know that there’s indeed a book with the same title, please notify me so I can change it) and it has no illustrations in it (or the illustrations are not that good), is it not wonderful to imagine how that tall, dark and handsome boy looks like? But if it has good illustrations in it, you might be imagining that tall, dark and handsome boy with the face and body of that boy in the illustration.
Watching the movie first before reading the book is the same with the situation above. I watched Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in the big screens first before reading the book so I thought the movie was really great. But after reading the book, I was somehow dissatisfied; there were some spectacular scenes and characters that did not make it to the movie.
Books indeed bring us to a new world, to the world of imagination where things can only exist in our ingenious minds. Sometimes I get shocked because the characters that reside in my brain were almost the same with the actors that portray them in the movies. Isn’t that cool?
