Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise

Children’s novels...spoke and still speak of hope. They say: look, this is what bravery looks like. This is what generosity looks like. They tell me, through the medium of wizards and lions and talking spiders, that this world we live in is a world of people who tell jokes and work and endure. Children’s books say: the world is huge. They say: hope counts for something. They say: bravery will matter, wit will matter, empathy will matter, love will matter. These things may or may not be true. I do not know. I hope they are.

If hope is a thing with feathers, then libraries are wings.

Children's books are not a hiding place, they are a seeking place.

When you read children’s books, you are given the space to read again as a child: to find your way back, back to the time when new discoveries came daily and when the world was colossal,

But the writing we call children’s fiction is not a childish thing: childish things include picking your nose and eating the contents, and tantruming at the failure to get your own way. The 45th President of America is childish. Children’s fiction has childhood at its heart, which is not the same thing.

The difficulties with the rule of readerly progression are many: one is that, if one followed the same pattern into adulthood, turning always to books of obvious increasing complexity, you’d be left ultimately with nothing but Finnegans Wake and the complete works of the French deconstructionist theorist Jacques Derrida to cheer your deathbed.

Children’s books in the house can be a dangerous thing in hiding: a sword concealed in an umbrella.

Crawling through dark tunnels in the company of hobbits, standing in front of oncoming trains waving a red flag torn from a petticoat: to read alone is to step into an infinite space where none can follow.

For reading not to become something that we do for anxious self-optimisation – for it not to be akin to buying high-spec trainers and a gym membership each January – all texts must be open, to all people.

Children’s fiction needs to widen and change again, as it has widened and transformed before. Recently a study of children’s fiction in the UK showed that only four per cent of books published in a year had any characters who were black, Asian or minority ethnic, but that 31.2 per cent of school children are from minority ethnic origins.

Children’s books today do still have the ghost of their educative beginnings, but what they are trying to teach us has changed. Children’s novels, to me, spoke, and still speak, of hope.

Children's books can teach us not just what we have forgotten, but what we have forgotten we have forgotten.

Those who write for children are trying to arm them for the life ahead with everything we can find that is true. And perhaps, also, secretly, to arm adults against those necessary compromises and necessary heartbreaks that life involves: to remind them that there are and always will be great, sustaining truths to which we can return.

Children will not be patient if you pontificate or meader or self-congratulate. Rather, children's fiction necessitates distillation: at its best, it renders in their purest, most archetypal forms hope, hunger, joy, fear. Think of children's books as literary vodka.