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"Make good art. I’m serious."

This is a collection of four essays, each forceful and energetic, that directly address why it is so important to read and write and, more importantly, they impress upon you why children should be doing it too.

This is not new material but has instead been published in various magazines and online publications, some of them even appeared in The View From the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction.

The essays are as followed:

1. Credo
2. Why Our Future Depends on Libraries, Reading and Daydreaming
3. Making a Chair (more of a poem really.)
4. Make Good Art

So you may have read these before, as I have; however, that being said, I’m not overly disappointed that there’s nothing new here beyond the illustrations. These pieces speak to each other and form a persuasive argument about the importance of art, regardless of the particular medium, and establish why it’s so important for society.

We need people who understand the world and can empathise with situations different to our own, we need leaders and individuals who can look past their own personal experience and act accordingly. We need literate people. We need people who can imagine a better world than the one we have so they can work towards building it (or at the very least representing it.) All in all, the world needs more readers, writers and artists. And Gaiman establishes it so convincingly here (not that many people who would pick a book up like this need convincing.)

“We need to teach our children to read. And to enjoy reading. We need libraries. We need books.�

I have so much respect for Gaiman and his work. As all writers do, he wrote stories to make money though he also did it because it was his passion. At the young age of fifteen he knew it was his calling and he worked towards his goals until he achieved success and fame (then he carried on writing some more!) Beyond that though, he has got so many children into reading with his work. Just look at his sales figures. Granted many of his readers are adults, but he has opened the literary doorways for many with his creative and intelligent writing.

Because of the sheer volume of quality work he has produced, the variety of it and the innovative nature of his original ideas, I think he deserves the noble prize for literature. I’m almost certain that this year he will win it. He has been shortlisted, and from the four candidates chosen, it seems to be a two horse race between Gaiman and Murakami (.) Both are fantastic writers, though I think Gaiman has a slight edge because he can write in very different ways where Murakami has found his niche and dominates it.

Could 2018 be Gaiman’s year? If I were a betting man, I’d put money down that it is. (What a victory that would be for the world of fantasy literature.)

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