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

Go to children’s fiction to see the world with double eyes: your own, and those of your childhood self.

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

I still find libraries astonishing; I still think they speak to our better instincts. The library remains one of the few places in the world where you don’t have to buy anything, know anyone or believe anything to enter in. It’s our most egalitarian space.

In order to read children’s books, of course, you must first be able to access them.

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.

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, before your imagination was trimmed and neatened, as if it were an optional extra.

I’ve forgotten, at various times in my life, how to read: how to lay aside scepticism and fashion and trust myself to a book.

Children’s fiction does something else too: it offers to help us refind things we may not even know we have lost.

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

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 their vulnerability.