Forest Book

For the most part, reading my kids' books is a chore. Many of the volumes are well written, good quality books, but the bottom line is that they're children's books. They don't satisfy my grown up intellect, nor do they usually offer the entertainment I get from literary brain candy. There are exceptions of course, the most frequent being what the wife calls discovery books. Discovery books offer lots of pictures, peppered with little factoids. If the young'uns leave one sitting around, I'll invariably pick it up and start perusing it. Anyway, Forest is such a discovery book, published by the masters of discovery books Dorling Kindersley. The book is about forests, of course, with colorful spreads about each type of forest in the world and the creatures that inhabit them. (You also have the obligatory environmental pages, to indoctrinate your children into saving the planet... or at least limit their depredation of the same.) It's a really nice book, though the pre-press artist in me would quibble on some of the photo montages. Hopefully, you have kids, so you'll have a perfect excuse to check it out.