A Good Book is Like A Secret Door
Mac Barnett lies to children for a living … he writes children’s books. He calls them “honest lies” – I call them: “masterful stories.” I don’t know the guy personally, but I’d like to sit with him over a soda sometime and try to figure out if it’s possible to get some of what he has. “A blue whale is longer than thirty dogs lined up nose to tail,” he writes. “Its tongue weighs as much as four hundred cats. Blue whales make terrible pets….Just ask Billy Twitters.”
The intro to “Billy Twitters and His Blue Whale Problem“ is merely the tip of Mac’s iceberg: he lectures and he writes books children can get lost in reading. He used to run a free tutoring center for kids in the back of a pirate supply store but now runs the same in a time travel emporium.
The inimitable Mssr. Barnett seems to have a tiny bit of a problem with boundaries – the ones between wishes and reality. Watch how he explains himself in this TED talk describing why a good book is like a secret door, how writing should escape the page, that art is a doorway to wonder… and see if you can spot his plan to send excess Blue Whales to willing kids.