Why waste your time on social media when you could be flicking through picture books?

‘It’s quite rare that I pick one up without feeling as if I’ve improved my knowledge of the world.’ Photograph: Pavlina Popovska/Getty Images (posed by a model)

There are lots of reasons not to read picture books. You can’t really mark them “done” in the same way you might, say, tick A Tale of Two Cities off your bucket list, or add them to your tally when you’re humble-bragging about what you’ve read over the past 12 months. They aren’t going to become part of the cultural zeitgeist, like Middlemarch or The Odyssey, and you probably won’t be able to persuade a book group to talk about them.

Recently, though, I’ve been getting back into them in a big way, poking around the “oversized” shelves of my local charity shops, cooing over large-format collections of Hokusai prints in Waterstones.