flowering trees

Why you - adult - should read children's books

"Children's fiction does something else too: it offers to help us refind things we may not even know we have lost. Adult life is full of forgetting; I have forgotten most of the people I have ever met; I've forgotten most of the books I've read, even the ones that changed me forever; I've forgotten most of my epiphanies. And I've forgotten, at various time in my life, how to read: how to lay aside scepticism and fashion and trust myself to a book. At the risk of sounding like a mad optimist: children's fiction can reteach you how to read with an open heart. 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 discoveries came daily and the world was colossal, before your imagination was trimmed and neatened, as if it were an optional extra" 

 

Katherine Rundell