Now there’s a title?
Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise is a very short book/longish essay from 2019. I just read it yesterday, or, to be more accurate, I gulped it down yesterday.
Author Katherine Rundell is a British author and academic whose work has won awards in both categories, and reading this, it is easy to say while. The writing is lovely: clean, original, and surprising. It is honest and insightful, blending scholarship smoothly with personal anecdotes and direct reasoning about what children’s literature is and why it matters. Along the way Rundell dismisses some misconceptions about children’s literature, reading, and humanity. And at times she’s funny.
This brief book makes a profound argument about the importance of children’s books, and is a genuine pleasure to read.
The only thing bad I can think of about the book is that I found it hard to find in American bookstores.