{"id":10688,"date":"2007-10-28T15:55:40","date_gmt":"2007-10-28T19:55:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2007\/10\/28\/10688.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:57:40","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:57:40","slug":"book-report-the-invention-of-h","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2007\/10\/28\/book-report-the-invention-of-h\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: The Invention of Hugo Cabret"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

So. The Invention of Hugo Cabret<\/a> is a pretty cool idea for a book, and even a pretty cool book. It’s a sort of graphic novel, but it’s not a graphic novel<\/I>. It’s not an illustrated book, either. It’s about half pictures and half text. The pictures don’t have text, or captions, or dialogue boxes; they are sort of still photos from a movie of the story, while the text is the novel of the story. But you can’t pick one; the plot is brought forward through both. And the story is lovely, and the pictures are lovely, so that’s all good.
\n

I had two complaints. The first is that although the pictures are lovely, they aren’t terribly detailed. Having turned a page of text to find a double-page spread, I wanted to read<\/I> that picture. Instead, I found myself just registering what was going on (he’s running, he’s scared, there’s someone behind him) and flipping the page. This is my preference for how I wanted to read, and of course Brian Selznick (who both wrote and illustrated it) made the book he wanted, not the one I wanted, which is fine. But I found that frustrating and disappointing.
\n

My other complaint is that the book is incredibly heavy. It’s printed on higher-quality paper than most books of its size. I don’t know if it’s full picture-book paper, but it feels about halfway between, in terms of slickness and thickness. As a result, the books is very thick and very heavy, and difficult to read. And because it’s half-pictures, and the pictures go by very fast, and there isn’t much text on a page, it takes about as long to read as a 250-page YA novel, which is to say, not very long at all. And yet it’s as big and heavy as a Harry Potter book.
\n

In fact, I weighed them:
\n

Hugo<\/I>: 534 pp., 2 lbs, 13 oz (no dust jacket)
\n

Harry (VII)<\/I>: 759 pp., 2 lbs, 12 oz (including dust jacket)
\n

I’m not saying it’s a book with thump<\/I>, I’m saying it’s a heavy book.
\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which a book is weighed and found heavy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10688"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10688\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18144,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10688\/revisions\/18144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}