Today’s reading is a comic fable about appetite. Henry discovers that books are delicious, and soon he is swallowing them whole, growing smarter with every bite, until his hunger outruns him. He feels sick, and all that knowledge comes out jumbled. Only when he stops eating does Henry pick up a book and find out what reading can do. Oliver Jeffers paints Henry onto real old paper: book pages, ledgers, maps, even the margins of a 1918 Finance Act, so the whole world of the story looks like something Henry might have taken a bite out of.

I shaped this episode around an “Appetite” arc: the boy who wants everything at once, the moment that hunger turns against him, and the quieter joy he finds when he slows down. It seemed a good story for anyone, child or grown-up, who has ever tried to read too much too fast.

Before recording, I chose the “loved BOOKS” page for my index card. In the book, Henry stands in his red striped sweater, one hand on his hip, holding a red book up for inspection like a dish he is about to enjoy. My version gives him a red gelli-printed body and a face cut from paper printed with toadstools, so the mushrooms became his eyes and mouth. In his raised hand I put a red copy of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, which I thought Henry might find especially filling. He stands inside a red border with black dots, in my handmade red-and-black frame.

Watch the full episode, and then pick up a book and enjoy it slowly, one page at a time.