One and Everything

This is the kind of book that makes you think. It made me think so much, I had to read it more than once.

It starts with illustrations in colourful dots representing the many stories for the world, stories with symbols, stories with words, stories that are just blobs of colour, of sunsets, oceans, animals and more.

But then one story decides it will be the One, the Only story, so it eats up all the other stories until there is nothing but one huge story with all the other stories inside it. But something inside the One is happening…

A quirk of this book is that approximately half of it is the Author’s Note. The note explains that writing is only a few thousand years old and suggests that if you measure that against how long humans have been using spoken language, then can be considered a very new technology. The remainder of the book explains some of the characters fond in One & Everything in a fascinating narrative of different forms of writing.

This book could be used with older students to springboard an inquiry about how writing has evolved and the meaning behind the symbols.