The Neverending Book by Naoki Matatyoshi and Shinsuke Yoshitake

There are all kinds of book-lovers. Some read fanatically in a particular area - romances, or books about trains, or conspiracy theories. The ones who tend to self-identify as "book-lovers," though, are usually more general and waffly: they just love books, they say. Some of them seem to love the idea of books more than any specifics - they spend a lot of time acquiring and planning and arranging and talking about books, implying they like those things more than reading.

The Neverending Book is a fable about books, so it's for those self-described book lovers. It's by two Japanese men - writer Naoki Matayoshi is an author and comedian, and illustrator Shinsuke Yoshitake has created picture books and other things - but, luckily for its chances in the rest of the world, Neverending isn't really limited or defined by Japanese tastes in reading or popular genres in that country.

Maybe that means "book lovers" are the same kind of people around the world, no matter the language they read in? 

In any case, here's how it goes: there's an old king who loves reading, but his eyes have gotten too bad to read. So he hires two men to go out and scour the world to find the strangest books they can...and come back to tell him about those books.

And here's where I went huh? Why doesn't the king want to actually hear the stories from those books? Shouldn't the two guys come back with big rucksacks full of books, pull them out one by one, and just read them to the king?

But, no, they won't. This is a story about books in the abstract. Not books that were sweated over by a person, each word put down just right. Not books that were set in type carefully, re-read multiple times, and sent out into the world by a publishing team eager to see what the reaction would be. Not books that respond to earlier books, argue against previous understanding or say "the way to do this plot is this way."

(I like those kinds of books, as you might guess. Maybe because I worked in that industry for a long time, and lost the book lovers' sense of books as magical objects that just appear out of nowhere. Real books are contingent and particular and specific - from the real people that made them in that time and place, and all of those things are exciting and worth celebrating.)

But, anyway, the king, I guess, has heard enough actual books. He now wants to hear stories that all begin "there was this one book..."

And so he does. The two men come back with a store of second-hand stories, and tell them to the king - verbally, apparently from memory, since Yoshitake doesn't draw them holding books. The two men alternate nights, and they seemed to me to be telling different kinds of stories.

The first man, drawn with long fuzzy hair, tells stories about books that are more active, like people or animals, for the first few days - books that bounce or eat other books, that choose their owners or tame monsters.

The second man, drawn as bald, tells stories about more grounded books - the one he hasn't read but is sure it will make his life better, the one everyone in a foreign country gets at birth, the one full of stories about regret and loss.

They change up somewhat as they go - the seventh day in particular is a very long, quite different story that is mostly not framed as "this is one book," and I won't spoil it. (It's the best part of the book, I think.)

I came to think of the first man as Yoshitake - that seventh day has a first-person narrator with a name that seems to be a variation of his - and the second man as Matayoshi, but I could easily be wrong. Maybe they each influenced or wrote those sections, maybe not. But they do seem to be slightly different in their focuses, in the stories they tell and what they're concerned about.

They tell stories for thirteen days, and then those stories are collected in this very book - of course. There is a bit of a twist at the end, which may surprise a few duller readers, but it's the way this book needed to end, and it's handled well.

The secret of The Neverending Book is that isn't not really about books. It's about life, and how you live your life, and the stories you tell yourself along the way. That's why none of the stories here are written by people, or attributed to anyone, and why so many of the books are more like people - they all are people: either the reader herself or people in her life. That may come across as a cheat for some rfolks who encounter this book - the kind who care deeply that a book is the product of another mind, one of the few ways we can really follow and understand another person's thinking processes, to see how they construct an argument or a sequence. For you, I say: I get it; I am one of you, and that was my reaction as well. This is a book for "book lovers," and all that implies.

I think The Neverending Book will be successful here in North America as well: we have the same kind of book lovers, the same sort of people who want to know that their lives have meaning and purpose, who want to hear "there was this one book" and learn things about themselves and the world, almost incidentally along the way. If you know people like that, grab this book to give them as a gift before they hear about it otherwise.