Why waste your time on social media when you could be flicking through picture books? | Joel Snape

There are lots of reasons not to read picture books. You can’t really mark them “done” in the same way you might, say, tick A Tale of Two Cities off your bucket list, or add them to your tally when you’re humble-bragging about what you’ve read over the past 12 months. They aren’t going to become part of the cultural zeitgeist, like Middlemarch or The Odyssey, and you probably won’t be able to persuade a book group to talk about them.

Recently, though, I’ve been getting back into them in a big way, poking around the “oversized” shelves of my local charity shops, cooing over large-format collections of Hokusai prints in Waterstones.

When I say “picture books”, by the way, I mean that in the broadest possible sense: books with lots of pictures in them. I’ve got a history of opera that I’m sure is intended for children, as well as a natural history guide that features page after page of taxonomic descriptions of moss.

Picture books are a great leveller: anyone can jump into them, anywhere they like, with no need to trudge through the boring early bits to get to the juicy stuff. For some topics, they’re a requirement – maps, art and cross-sections are the obvious examples – but they make almost anything more memorable. A few years ago, I interviewed a University Challenge champion who swore by them as a way of getting an entry-level overview of nearly any subject. It’s quite rare that I pick one up without feeling as if I’ve improved my knowledge of the world.

What I really like about picture books, though, is that they contain so many of the appealing features of social media and so few of the bad ones. They’re created to invite the eye, often with lots of what magazine designers call “entry points”. Perhaps you’d like to learn more about this Parasaurolophus skull? Maybe the Bayeux tapestry is more your speed? They’re written by experts and rigorously factchecked, usually without too much of the explicit political posturing that makes online life so draining.

Best of all, you can deep-dive into one topic, or flit across dozens in mere moments, occasionally stopping to read an entire thread (sorry, page) when something catches your interest. Hormones, horses, Hinduism, the hundred years war: who doesn’t feel as if they could know more about these things?

In the 21st century, it’s easy to believe that nobody needs reference books any more. All the answers, after all, are online, either on Wikipedia or ruthlessly scraped from real books by rapacious AI models. It’s just as easy to burrow down a rabbit hole on the internet as it is with the Dorling Kindersley Family Encyclopedia on your lap, except that the former goes on for ever.

The big problem is that there’s no sense of proportion on the internet: it’s more enticing to read about rollercoaster disasters than Renaissance painters – and there’s more scurrilous detail available. It’s also far too easy to click straight over to Facebook, or Bluesky, or BuzzFeed, and emerge half an hour later knowing nothing more about the Sistine chapel.

Picture books, by contrast, are one of the most soothing ways to fill spare time. They fit perfectly with a definition of “proper” reading that I’ve borrowed from the author Naomi Alderman: the sort you wish you were doing more of, rather than the sort that makes you feel grubby afterwards. If you sit on the sofa with a picture book, preferably with your phone out of reach, you tend to emerge with a new sense of wonder about the world and our capacity to explore it and understand it.

You can often pick them up cheaply, or borrow them by the half-dozen from your local library. (If you put them in a rucksack, this doubles as your workout for the day.) Even if you could live the rest of your life without needing to understand the difference between mountain fork-moss and ostrich-plume feather-moss, wouldn’t it be richer if you did?

Joel Snape is a freelance writer