If you played with LEGOs when you were a kid, chances are you remember your best, biggest or most unique creation. Chances are, too, that whatever it was, it was nothing like the fantastic pieces featured in this fun new coffee table book, Beautiful LEGO.

There are a lot of artists, including book compiler Doyle, that make amazing sculptures out of the children’s toys, and Beautiful LEGO contains full-color photos of a couple hundred of their most impressive pieces.

Chapters are broken down to an individual artist’s work, like eight pages of birds made by Thomas Poulsom in the “Tweets” segment. Or, by genre with various artists representing, like in the “Quite the Character” section where LEGO sculptures of everyone from Shakespeare to Jack Sparrow abound.

Elsewhere, pages overflow with LEGO hot rods, bugs, robots, monsters, aliens and food items from turkey to tacos. There’s Iron Man, a calypso dude with long flowing braids, a miniMoog and a dial telephone. Some of the most amazing pieces are the buildings -- futuristic, medieval or a combination of the two such as Doyle’s “City of Odan,” a 6-foot tall, 200,000 brick castle-like piece.

Featured artists include Nathan Sawaya, Mike Nieves, Arthur Gulick, Jordan Schwartz, Nannan Zhang and several others.

Beautiful LEGO is not a how-to book, but its jaw-dropping creations are very inspiring; don’t be surprised if you find yourself rummaging through the storage room looking for your disused LEGOs after you’ve perused the book.
 
Grade: A