Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise by Katherine Rundell

Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise by Katherine Rundell

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


My stance is clear, I think, and has been so for a while: children’s literature is important and to assign a value judgement upon it, indeed to assign a value judgement upon any form of literature is an exercise full of redundancy and wasted effort. Books are important, and no genre or age-group or vaguely ambitious grouping thought up by somebody with too much time on their hands should impinge upon your reading of whoever and whatever you want. And yet children’s literature is undoubtedly marginalised; we adopt, as Katherine Rundell recognises in this potent volume, an attitude that takes us away from such things. We read one way, not the other; we reach for increasingly complex and challenging things when, I suspect, a night reading a picture book would be of much more benefit.

It is this at this point that the slender sized and lengthily titled Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though Are So Old and Wise places itself; it seeks to question that movement of “readerly progression” from and away from children’s literature and to remind readers of just what is that they’re giving up and the somewhat misguided rationales that may be driving such. Katherine Rundell is a beautiful writer and this is a book that burns not only with grace, passion but also with knowledge – it quotes everybody from Martin Amis through to John Donne without pausing for breath.

It’s because of this that Why You Should… felt like something of a tease to me; it is a book that left me wanting more. Rundell is a brilliant, brilliant writer and critical thinker, and I would love to hear more about why she moves more towards “children’s fiction” than “children’s literature”, for example, or what she actually thinks about the influence of adults upon children’s literature – a debate that is very present within academia but somewhat delicately stepped back from here. There is a bright and burning and fiercely eloquent core to this text, and it shows itself fleetingly – but when it does, it is so very worth holding onto. I think that I just wanted a little bit more of that edge.





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