Title: Books for Benjamin
Author: R.G. de Rouen
Illustrations: watercolor paintings by Uliana Barabash
Date: 2022
Publisher: R.G. de Rouen
ISBN: the e-book shows ISBN's, but they're illegible
Quote: "Benjamin...would rather read about adventures in a giant peach than eat one."
"Bookworm" is a nickname, usually for a person who reads or collects books, but also for any of several insects that eat paper. None of these insects is a worm, scientifically speaking. Some are beetle larvae, one is a moth larva, and some don't even have a wormy shape, like booklice (a.k.a. bark lice) and silverfish. Booklice actually eat mold, and the damp wood or processed wood fibre on which it grows; some other paper-eating insects also eat only the wet, moldy, or otherwise decaying parts away from books. The insects that eat vegetables mostly belong to different biological "families."
But in this thoroughly unscientific fable, Benjamin Bookworm leaves a family of "worms" who eat rotten vegetables and, after some mishaps, getsinto a library where he can live on air and read books for the rest of his days. He moves to the Library of Congress and is givent he job of stamping his smiling face on books next to the date of publication to remind himself which books he's read. If you doubt this, just look in a book and see the sidewise smile beside the...
At least the writer explains what the copyright symbol really is, at the end.
I chortled. This is not a book I'd want to read to a four-year-old every night for a year, but it is the sort of thing that belongs among the free-reading books at the back of a primary school room, or int he school library.
Probably a perfect aunt would not buy this book for, or recommnd it to, children who use their high tolerance for "worm" stories to gross out friends or family members with lower tolerance. A surprising amount of this web site's current content reflects the fact that I've never claimed to be a perfect aunt.
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