Pick Me Up by DK Publishing

In our three-thousand square-foot office space, there is only one room that has a door. It’s about the size of an office, but we use it as our “conference room.” There’s a desk, a few chairs, a small sofa, and bookcases along one wall. It is in this room that we have meetings and I tutor my writing students.

On the floor of this room is a small, overflowing shelf of books I have collected for the sole purpose of lending them to my students. Luckily, all nine of them love reading, and they usually race into our classroom to look at the books before class starts. The new students always have the most amazed expression when they learn that they are allowed to borrow anything on the shelf.

“Can I borrow more than one?” one boy asked. I suggested he finish one book, and then borrow another one next week. “But I can read more than one book a week,” he told me.

“Really?” I asked, because I sure can’t.

“Yeah. I sometimes read a book every day.”

“Well, OK then. You can borrow as many as you like, as long as you can finish them all in one week.”

One particularly popular book on the shelf is an ARC of Pick Me Up: Stuff You Need to Know published by DK. It’s the almanac, or encyplopedia maybe, of the MTV generation. The big, fat book is packed with all kinds of information, trivial and not, that are illustrated with bright colors, photographs, charts, games, and lists. And the information is in no particular order.

Pages 48 and 49 are about the moon landing in 1969, including pictures of the moon, the technology behind the rocket program, the story of the landing, and science fiction trivia. Turn the page and you get a two-page spread about capitalism and economics. Information on this page includes a fake Capitalism game that looks like monopoly, and information about everything from banks to Marxism to free markets. Some pages have you turn to a specific other page to get more information on the same topic. One page has nothing except, in huge lettering, “ARE YOU A GIRL? Turn to page 224.”

It’s pretty hard to describe Pick Me Up, since it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. Actually, it seems very much like television in book form. While some think it’s a sign that our children are being dumbed down and their attention spans are approaching zero, I rather like this book. It seems bright, energetic, and exciting. It is full of truly interesting, useful, and important information that is presented in a way that is anything but boring. Throw in some gimmicks, some trivia, and a lot of pictures, and you’ve got a kid-friendly educational tool.

It does get borrowed from the lending shelf, that’s for sure.

Pick Me Up by DK Publishing

Tags: children's+books encyclopedia MTV DK+Publishing