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A review by jwsg
Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise by Katherine Rundell
4.0
In Why You Should Read Children's Books Even Though You Are Old and Wise, Rundell debunks the notion that most adults have that "we should only read in one direction, because to do otherwise would be to regress or retreat: to demature…The difficulties with the rule of readerly progression are many: one is that, if one followed the same pattern into adulthood, tyrning always to books of increasing complexity, you'd be left ultimately with nothing but Finnegans Wake and the complete works of…Jacques Derrida to cheer your deathbed".
Rundell reminds us that:
#1: "children's books are specifically written to be read by a section of society without political or economic power. People who have no money, no vote, no control over capital or labour or the institutions of state; who navigate the world in their knowledge of vulnerability. And, by the same measure, by people who are not yet preoccupied by the obligation of labour, not yet skilled in forcing their own prejudices on to other people and chewing at their own hearts. And because at so many times in life, despite what we tell ourselves, adults are powerless too, we as adults must hasten to children's books to be reminded of what we have left to us, whenever we need to start out all over again."
#2: That when we read children's fiction, we (re)learn how to read with a sense of wonder, imagination and an open heart. Rundell muses that "[t]hose 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."
Rundell's piece is a compact 70 pages and a lovely reminder of the pleasures and wisdom that can be found in children's books, and that one can read children's books for one's own sake, and not just for the kiddos.
Rundell reminds us that:
#1: "children's books are specifically written to be read by a section of society without political or economic power. People who have no money, no vote, no control over capital or labour or the institutions of state; who navigate the world in their knowledge of vulnerability. And, by the same measure, by people who are not yet preoccupied by the obligation of labour, not yet skilled in forcing their own prejudices on to other people and chewing at their own hearts. And because at so many times in life, despite what we tell ourselves, adults are powerless too, we as adults must hasten to children's books to be reminded of what we have left to us, whenever we need to start out all over again."
#2: That when we read children's fiction, we (re)learn how to read with a sense of wonder, imagination and an open heart. Rundell muses that "[t]hose 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."
Rundell's piece is a compact 70 pages and a lovely reminder of the pleasures and wisdom that can be found in children's books, and that one can read children's books for one's own sake, and not just for the kiddos.