Day 24 – A book that you wish more people would’ve read

I was thinking about talking about the books about Lina but I’ve already covered them. And I’ve talked about Per Anders Fogelström’s City series which I wish was completely translated. So coming up with a book for this topic has been hard. Then I realised that one of my favourite books growing up hasn’t been translated to English (to my knowledge) it is called Minus och stora världen (Minus and the Big World) by Sven Nordqvist. I’ve previously talked about my love for Nordqvist’s books about Pettson and his cat Findus but the book about Minus is equally awesome.

Minus is a young boy who goes out into the world in search of adventure. On each page spread in the book following the initial pages a number is featured, starting with 1 and ending with 10. On each page he gets an item of some kind (a pencil sharpener that looks like a globe and a handkerchief with a heraldry for example). On each of the spreads Nordqvist’s humorous drawings enforce the different numbers. Take as an example the spread for the number 4 here there are four churches on four hills, four rocks on top of each other, three apples and a pear (so four fruits) etc. This allows the parent and child to search each page for the correct number of the different items (educational AND fun ). After the initial ten spreads the following pages feature Minus giving away the items he has acquired as well as the numbers 11-100 in different ways.

This is such a fun book that I wish that it had been translated into more languages so that more people could read this fantastic book.

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