"My Love for Children's Books and "Why You Should Read Children's Books...", by Katherine Rundell

This is my second essay of the weekend. There are a couple of others simmering on the cooker, but not yet ready for the table.

As a fan (and modest collector) of children’s books, I had fun with this essay. While all children’s stories may not be politically correct, there is wisdom inthem. To censor or ban children’s books, because their content may not accord with today’s moral teachings, is to deprive a child the ability to understand how his country’s culture changed and evolved over the years.

 

C.S. Lewis, author of the Narnia books, famously stated that a book worth reading at age ten is often equally – or even more – worth reading at age fifty. In the past ten years I have read (or re-read) such classics as Moby Dick, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Huckleberry Finn, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Lewis’s Narnia Tales, and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. None have done me harm. All have done me good. If you do not read Ms. Rundell’s book – which I hope you do – perhaps, my essay will cause you to re-read some of your favorites from childhood. 

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

“My Love for Children’s Books and...

Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old And Wise”

By Katherine Rundell

October 4, 2026

 

“The more that you read, the more things you will know.

The more that you learn, the more places you will go.”

                                                                                                            Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss), 1904-1991

                                                                                                             I Can Read With My Eyes Shut, 1978

 

For most of our married life I have collected books. In the late 1960s, while living in Durham, CT. we had a neighbor, Keith Hutchison. A retired editor of The Nation, he had been born in England in 1901, moved to New York, and retired to rural Connecticut. In Durham, he operated a search service for college libraries and a small used bookstore. Most important for me, he stimulated my interest. Forty-seven years later, when we sold our house in Old Lyme, I had more than 5,000 books, including several first editions of children’s books. Moving to Essex Meadows, we converted one room into a library, which houses about 700 books. I brought my favorites, gave my children what they wanted, and donated the balance to the town library.

 

I still buy books, but no longer as a collector. Today’s purchases are mostly given away once read. Not so Katherine Rundell’s wonderful short book. It has found a home on my shelves. Children’s books have long been favorites. I have first and/or signed editions of many, from Huckleberry Finn (bought from Mr. Hutchison) to Winnie the Pooh, Through the Looking Glass, Stuart Little and The Crock of Gold. Many years ago, in a second-hand Philadelphia bookstore, I found a first edition of one of my childhood favorites, Wolf Story by Willam McCleery. It was written in 1947 at the MacDowell Colony, in Peterborough, New Hampshire, the town where I grew up. 

 

Katherine Rundell is a Fellow at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford (where she completed her doctoral thesis on John Donne), and she is author of best-selling books for children and adults. In this brief (66 pages) book, Ms. Rundell takes us through her childhood reading experiences, a brief history of fairy tales, which “...were never just for children,” to the “Golden Age” of children’s literature that includes Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, J. M. Barrie and others. Separately, she writes of American authors, like Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, L. Frank Baum, Kay Thompson and Judy Blume. This is an informative, lively book.

 

“Children’s books,” she writes, “are not a hiding place; they are a seeking place...Remember what it was to long for impossible and perhaps-not-impossible things.” As E.B. White, in a 1969 interview with The Paris Review, said: “Anybody who shifts gears when he writes for children is likely to wind up stripping his gears.”

 

Like many, I have a predilection for children’s books. C.S. Lewis once wrote that a children’s story should be written simply because it is the best art-form for the story you have to tell. Ms. Rundell’s book will return you to your childhood, to the books you then read and to the dreams you once had.