"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.  

"A Family Story"

 As you may have noted, my output of essays has declined, especially those of a political nature. While there is much for which I am thankful – the border is secure; Iran has been deprived of a nuclear weapon; the economy appears robust; interest rates seem to be normalizing; "Wokeness" in the workplace and universities seems to be in remission; businesses and people appear to be adjusting to the inevitable changes that will be wrought by changes in technology – I am dismayed by the behavior many of our politicians on both sides of the aisle. Perhaps I am getting old, but I yearn for a time when civility and tolerance were more prominent, and less hatred was being expressed. 

Nevertheless, the pull of writing essays remains strong. This one is short about a single, but amusing, incident many years ago. And tomorrow I shall have a review of a short but delightful book.

 

The photo is of me and my five siblings (I am on the left), taken around 1950, outside of our home in Peterborough. Three more boys would be born before the family was complete.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

        “A Family Story”

October 3, 2026

 

“I was lucky to be born abnormal. It ran in the family.”

                                                                                                                                    E.B. White

                                                                                                                                    Letter to Mrs. Dorothy Guth

                                                                                                                                    March 16, 1984

 

We had pulled into a gas station somewhere near Athol, Massachusetts.

 

“Where you headed?” the attendant inquired.

 

“My mother-in-law’s,” my father replied.

 

He surveyed the car and trailer: “Does she know you’re coming?” was his dubious response.

 

My mother laughed.

 

It was around 1950. In our 1941 Ford station wagon, pulling a one-horse trailer in which were a Shetland pony and two goats, we were driving from Peterborough, New Hampshire to Madison, Connecticut to visit my grandmother. Besides my parents, in the car were six children, a couple of dogs and a cat.

 

My mother and father were artists – sculptors – who a few years earlier had started a small toy business, Red Shed Rubber Animals. My mother had grown up in New Haven and Madison, and my father in Wellesley, Massachusetts and Peterborough. They had married during the Depression and chosen to live lives quite different from that in which they had been raised. They created a close-knit family that included their love for family, horses and skiing. 

 

We saw a lot of my paternal grandparents, as they summered on property adjacent to ours. On the other hand, my maternal grandmother – widowed in 1947 – lived in the East River section of Madison; so we would spend a couple of weeks with her every summer. She had a barn; so the animals would not have to bed down in the house.

 

My mother’s response was infectious; my father saw the humor, as did we. They had grown up in the 1920s, were young adults during the 1930s Depression years, and my father went to war in 1944. The post-War years were filled with hope for peace and prosperity. But this moment at the gas station was funny. As E. B. White described his family in the epigraph above, we were an abnormally strange sight – a cacophonous station wagon, filled with voices of children – crying and laughing, and the sounds of animals – barking, mewing, neighing and bleating.

 

As we drove off, the attendant smiled.

Review - "He Has The People," Jonathan Earle

 It is extraordinary that the man generally considered the best President the United States has ever had was virtually unknown before being elected to the nation’s highest office. The last time he had won a race for elective office had been fourteen years earlier when he was elected to Congress. He served one term. Though he despised slavery, he did not campaign as a staunch abolitionist. He wanted to maintain the union. The fact that he was able to both abolish slavery and maintain the union – though at enormous cost – speaks to the greatness of the man. 

 

One of the best things about this book is that, including notes and index, it comes in at just over 200 pages – something appreciated by this aging octogenarian.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

He Has the People: Abraham Lincoln and the Election of 1860, Jonathan Earle

September 19, 2026

 

“...the most transformative election in American history.”

                                                                                                                He has the People, Jonathan Earle

 

History gets a bad rap, as humanities have been closeted among the undesirables. Yet history informs us of the past so to better understand the future, and it teaches us that the “most interesting times” are not necessarily those of today. In 1860, the first U.S. election for President had occurred only 72 years earlier – recent enough that there would have been a few people who would have remembered the election of George Washington. 

 

In 1860 the most important subject was slavery. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 required escaped slaves be returned to their owners. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 repealed the Missouri Compromise by letting local settlers decide on slavery in territories. The Dred-Scott Decision of 1857 (overturned in 1865 and 1868 with ratification of the 13^th and 14^thAmendments) stated that slaves were not citizens and that Congress could not ban slavery in federal territories. And John Brown, convicted of treason, murder and inciting a slave rebellion, was hanged in December 1859. 

 

Such was the setting, as the 1860 election got underway. Jonathan Earle, a professor of history at LSU, follows journalist Murat Halsted, editor-in-chief of the Cincinnati Commercial, as he attends all seven national political conventions in 1860. Mr. Halsted was also present at the hanging of John Brown. 

 

The political scene had been shifting. In the previous twenty-four years eight men had served as President. (William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor both died in office.) The Republican Party, heirs to the Whigs and home to Abolitionists, had only existed since 1854; John Frémont had been the first Republican candidate in 1856, a race won by James Buchanan. The last two Presidents had been Northern Democrats. They prevented secession by emphasizing sovereignty of the states.

 

Today Lincoln is deemed among the best Presidents the country has had, but his selection in 1860 was by no means certain. Earle writes: “The fact is, no seasoned observer in any political party would have considered Abraham Limcoln a favorite for the presidency as the 1860 campaign began.” Either William Seward or Salmon P. Chase expected the nomination. But John Brown’s raid on the armory at Harper’s Ferry hurt the chances of Seward and Chase, both northerners and tied more closely to the abolitionists’ movement. However, Lincoln’s speech at The Cooper Union in February gave confidence to a skeptical New York press and to “...Republicans [that] he would be a safe second choice.” He was nominated on the third ballot at the Republican convention. However, he had not won an election since 1846. 

 

Democrats split between Stephen Douglas (northern) and John Breckinridge (southern). Together they amassed as many popular votes as Lincoln, but fell behind him in the Electoral College, with a total of 84 votes. John Bell of the Constitutional Union Party (remnants of the Whigs) garnered 39 votes. Lincoln, with a minority of the popular vote, won in the Electoral College with 180 votes, or 59 percent.

 

As James McPherson’s blurb on the back cover reads, “...Jonathan Earle has written the best campaign account since Teddy White’s book on the 1960 election.”