By day, she researches the poetry of John Donne as a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. But in the evening, when Dr Katherine Rundell wants a bit of comfort, she reads Paddington. “As an adult, the thing I love about Paddington is that the structure Michael Bond has built into his books is one of hope. Things which appear to be negative turn out to be just cogs in the greater machine. I think Bond sees life as miraculous – and that’s in the structure of the book.”
In her own forthcoming work, Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise, Rundell argues that children’s literature offers unique insights and distinctive imaginative experiences to adults. “Defy those who would tell you to be serious,” she writes, “those who would limit joy in the name of propriety. Cut shame off at the knees... Plunge yourself soul-forward into a children’s book: see ifyou do not find in them an unexpected alchemy; if they will not un-dig in you something half hidden and half forgotten.”
Figures from UK book sales monitor Nielsen – based on a survey of 3,000 book buyers and seen exclusively by the Observer – indicate that 10.5 million works of children’s fiction were bought for readers aged 17 or over in 2018, a 42% increase on 2015, when only 7.4 million were purchased for these readers. Today, 39% is bought for readers over 16, with millennials identified as the biggest adult consumers of children’s fiction.
Rundell calls her book, which will be published in August by Bloomsbury, a “manifesto” to encourage more adults to take children’s books seriously. She had a strong personal motive for writing it: she pens prizewinning children’s novels and is sick of other academics and acquaintances giving her “this profoundly condescending smile” when she reveals she is a children’s author. Now 32, she was among the first cohort of children who grew up reading Harry Potter – “I was 12 when Harry was 12, I adored those books” – and exemplifies how her generation continues to hunger for children’s fiction as adults.
In 2018, Nielsen says 24-to-34-year-olds bought for themselves or received 12% of all the children’s fiction purchased, double the 6% recorded in 2014. Readers aged 17 to 24 were, however, the largest group of adults who bought children’s fiction for themselves, accounting for one in every eight purchases, compared to 10% five years ago. In total, a third of all children’s fiction purchased last year was by adults to read themselves.
“I think a lot of people have been, secretly perhaps, reading and loving children’s books in adulthood for a long time,” says Rundell. She wrote her book to warn adults who don’t: “You are missing a wealth of treasures.. To miss out on something so rich, strange, varied and enticing in adulthood, just out of embarrassment or perhaps because it hasn’t occurred to you, seems such a waste. There is such joy to be had.”
She thinks children’s books remind adults what it’s like “to long for impossible and perhaps-not-impossible things” like justice, love, adventure and happiness, and to feel a sense of hope, however childish: “Go to children’s fiction to see the world with double eyes: your own, and those of your childhood self,” she urges.
The Nielsen data also shows adults increasingly want children’s stories read to them: 61% of purchases of children’s audiobooks were for listeners over 16 in 2018, up dramatically from 38% in 2014.
Children’s authors, Rundell points out, are prepared to work very hard to ignite a child’s powerful imagination, creating vivid fantasy worlds which adult readers can profit from imagining, too. “I think there is a risk, in adulthood, through the compromises we make and the busyness of our lives, that we cease to cherish the imagination in the way we should. Because the imagination is absolutely essential for seeing the world truly.”
Children’s literature is written by adults, edited by adults and published by adults – so, of course, it is worthy of being read by adults, says Dr Louise Joy, senior college lecturer in English at Homerton College, Cambridge. “Adults who read children’s fiction can glimpse the beauty of thoughts pared down to their most naked and vulnerable. Adult literature often revels in complexity, ambiguity and doubt. But some of the most enduring children’s works reveal the world as we seek to view it, in a distilled and clear, focused way. They provide us with the narrative tidiness we yearn for and the clarity of focus that so often eludes us in adult life.”
An adult reading a children’s book experiences it differently to a child, she says. “We are reminded of what it’s like to inhabit a childish mentality and there is something painful about that. But there’s also something very comforting about being reminded of how to think in a more direct fashion and not be plagued by self-doubt or the pressure of always perceiving ambiguity and worrying about the indeterminacy of ideas or morality. It’s refreshing.”
When adults re-read books they first read as children, they remember their most private earliest self. “Reading is one of the earliest activities that we do on our own, and so it can return you to that sense of what you were like when you first were left to your own devices and became the person you uniquely fashioned inside your head.”
Children’s books every adult should read, according to Katherine Rundell
• Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones (1986) – a funny fantasy novel set in a magical kingdom. A cursed young woman goes on a hilarious quest to break an evil spell and make her fortune.
• Wed Wabbit by Lissa Evans (2017) – a surreal comic adventure story starring a clever 11-year-old who must solve ludicrous clues and puzzles to escape the world of the Wimbley Woos and save her little sister’s life.
• Cosmic by Frank Cottrell Boyce (2009) – a touching chapter book about a 12-year-old boy who looks like an adult and tries to compete with grown-ups to be sent into space.
• A Bear Called Paddington by Michael Bond (1958) – a polite bear wearing a hat and a label round his neck meets the Brown family at Paddington Station and begins a lifetime of sweet and comical adventures, often involving marmalade sandwiches.
• Northern Lights by Philip Pullman (2015) – a brave, determined little girl goes on a thrilling adventure to find her missing friend in a rich fantasy world full of danger and daemons.
• The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908) – the timeless tale of a timid mole who makes friends with a rat on a riverbank and gets caught up in a series of adventures with a toad.
