Why I read children's books

The simple faith of the imagination

Sometimes when I am ill, or too tired to do anything else, I read children’s books. I enjoy them at other times, too, but it seems much more excusable to spend time reading Narnia when I’m incapable of reading something that will contribute to my other research or this Substack. And yet, children’s books have a way of worming themselves into your consciousness and tapping inside your mind so that you feel compelled to go back to them, the way Lucy felt compelled to go back to Narnia. So I often find myself immersed into a book that will not be useful to me in any way but which I simply had to read. (You can read my notes on the children’s books I have been reading at the bottom.)

There is a great pleasure to reading children’s books as an adult that is separate from the pleasure of remembering them. The Magician’s Nephew was probably my favourite book as a child. Reading it now it a dual pleasure of rediscovery and current immersion.

But there is, perhaps, a greater pleasure in reading children’s books as an adult for the first time. When I first read Charlotte’s Web, though, I was in my twenties. This was a whole new world. I read it in one sitting and was distraught by the ending. I read, that is, for the first time in many years, like a child.

What does that mean? Beyond the sense of reading so deeply that the world around you goes quiet and you feel, once you put the book down, like you just came to the surface after being submerged (a feeling we are all more likely to associate with going down internet rabbit holes—a phrase, very tellingly, that comes from Alice in Wonderland), reading like a child means reading with the simple acceptance of the imagination, which is akin to having a simple faith.

By simple I mean, “undesigning; sincere”. This is not naive or witless simplicity, but the simplicity of one who is able to take the book on its own terms rather than constantly assess it, search within it to decode its meaning, or to be forever pattern matching the book against your existing beliefs and ideas to decide “what it means” or “what sort of message” it has for you or, worst of all, to decide if you approve of the book. Books must be allowed to teach us how to read them, but as adults we are forever allowing our own feelings to colour our reactions to a book. Children are much better at simply entering the world of the book itself.

So many people want to hear optimistic, hopeful messages (and spend too much time watching movies and shows that have redemptive story arcs), and will find them in the books they read—hence the culture that treats Jane Austen primarily as a romance writer without giving equal weight to the satirical and the philosophical elements in her work. We are largely secular and so much less able to see the religious aspects of many classic novels: yes Jane Eyre is feminist, but it is feminist in a very low-Church manner that is now much less visible to us. We see what know; but if we read like children we will see what is there.

Children, as Diana Wynne Jones was always saying, pay much more attention than adults. They enter into the world of the book and they accept what it tells them. We find St. John irritating and we disapprove of him, so we glide more easily over his section. Children are so absorbed in the book they come away with much clearer ideas of the world they have been reading about. As adults reading children’s books we can start to rediscover that ability to enter the dream of the work of art.