Why do children read books?

As an author of books for kids and teens, this question often occupies my mind.  I follow trends, read bestsellers and award winners, parse the accolades and ponder formulas.  And often, especially back in the days when I was courting agents and editors and trying to fit through that door, trying to be the right shape and size and pedigree, I would set about to write something new, and I would think, this time, this time I will fit.  But invariably, alas, I would be doomed to write what interested me.  And I would be told, the voice isn’t quite middle grade.  In fact, it isn’t YA either, or New Adult or even Adult – we don’t know what you are. 

Why do children read books?

Most of the children’s books I grew up on could be read and enjoyed by a person of any age.  They were works of complicated diction and long words, some of which I didn’t know.  And it didn’t matter one bit.  In fact, that’s how I learned to think, by encountering and being swept away by language that was a bit beyond my ken.  Heidi, The Secret Garden, Little Women, The Hobbit – these books captured me completely.  And in looking back on why I read as a child, I finally found the answer to my question.  It was my answer, not a universal answer, and it was also the solution to why I did not fit easily through the gatekeeper’s door.

Children read books in order to dwell. 

That’s also why I write.  Children have a superpower that we lose as we age.  They are able to disappear completely.  Into a moment, an experience, and a book.  I was with Heidi when we straggled to the top of the mountain after our long, uncertain hike only to discover grandfather’s hut, perched next to an alpine meadow with goats grazing in the dusk and snow-capped mountains rising, peak upon peak, in the misty beyond.  I was with Bilbo when Gandalf came knocking, when he formed his ridiculous resolve to leave his cozy hobbit hole and venture off into the unknown.  I rattled over the Yorkshire moors at night with Mary, cranky, alone, and later discovered within an abandoned enclosure of stone walls a secret garden.  I can still picture these moments, as clearly as if they were memories from life.  I can’t read that way anymore, but I get close when I write.  I can disappear into a book that is forming in my mind’s eye.  And because the process is slower and deeper and infinitely mysterious, I sink in.

Children read, not to consume, but to dwell.  An analog trait.

I talked with Margaret about this.  You will remember Margaret J. Anderson from my previous blog post about the wondrous journey of the magical cicada.  She came to professional writing back in the 1960s, first penning nature and science articles for children’s magazines, then science books for McGraw Hill.  It was all very civilized back then, very personal, or so it seems, looking back from 2020, deep into the digital age.  Let’s wax nostalgic for a moment.  No agent, no emails venturing into the abyss — you sent your story or your novel off with the mailman in his clever, little bag , enclosed with an S.A.S.E. (that dinosaur of conventions), and, in Margaret’s case, you eventually got a letter back saying, why yes, we’d love to introduce you to the world.

Ah, it makes a person misty, doesn’t it?  But I suppose, to be fair, I will have to mention the multiple, typewritten manuscripts, the gallons of white-out (dinosaur number two), the research conducted solely by recourse to (gasp) books and libraries and human beings.  Sounds like a lot of work.

Margaret did it very well.  And when her four children were young, she decided to try her hand at novels.  She had always enjoyed “time slip” fiction, stories where children unwittingly stumbled through portals into other worlds, and so, voila!  To Nowhere and Back was born.  Clearly, this creation wasn’t right for McGraw Hill, but Knopf had a reputation for literary quality.  Off went the missive, compliments of Mr. Postman, and after the expiration of three months, a letter arrived saying, lovely, your book is lovely, and we’d like to publish it. 

And, of course, it was lovely, like all of Margaret’s books, exactly the kind I would have enjoyed as a child, steeped in the mists of the British Isles of her youth, books that took you by the hand and invited you along, not in a tremendous hurry, because getting there was half the fun.  Her first effort garnered a NYT Book of the Year accolade, and she went on to write many novels, all for Knopf, all with the same editor, through the 70s and into the 80s, when she went back to science writing, full circle.

I asked Margaret my question.  Why do children read?  I wanted to know if I was alone.  Was it possible that all that children really wanted was sweet, salty, sticky stuff that went down easy, but left you hungry for more?  Maybe kids were different nowadays.  Maybe you needed that perfect plot twist, that blockbuster premise, that cutting edge idea that would make your book the ultimate commodity.  Was that what kids wanted?

There’s a lovely passage from Margaret’s memoir of her Scottish childhood about just this theme:

Several of the books on the shelves in our bedroom dated back to my mother’s childhood.  They tended to be rather moral, and often sad.  I remember sobbing over young Ada’s death in Ada and Gertie.  My mother had wept for Ada a generation earlier.  Elnora Comstock’s mother was mean beyond belief in A Girl of the Limberlost.  Poor Judy Abbott, who wrote an entire book of letters to Daddy Long Legs, spent her childhood in the dreary John Grier Orphanage.  In What Katy Did, after being warned not to play on the swing in the woodshed, Katy Carr fell and injured her spine, leaving her bedridden for the next 60 pages.

These last three books were all by American authors, but I don’t think their American setting broadened my horizons, because I imagined all the action happening in our back yard.  Ann and I spent hours acting out the stories, pretending to be the different characters.  We especially loved the Carr family in the Katy books.  Being the oldest, I always got to be tomboy Katy and Ann had to settle on being gentle Clover or whiny Elsie.  We had our own version of the Carr children’s “Paradise” under the rhododendron bushes at the bottom of the garden, where we ate secret feasts. 

Anderson, Margaret, From a Place Far away: My Scottish Childhood In World War II, Lychgate Press, 2017

Well, this is just an analog goldmine.  That’s all there is to it.  Take, for instance, the way in which the books Margaret’s mother read as a child act as portals into a bygone world, her mother’s world, with all its strange sadness and severity.  And yet the books are also nexus, bringing Margaret’s experience and her mother’s together, into the present moment.  What is that if not magic?

But the real answer to my question lies in the latter part of this passage, in the hours of imaginative play.  This is dwelling made literal, tangible.  The urge to disappear is taken to its logical extreme by inhabiting the characters through play – a beautiful, mysterious, imperiled urge that, I believe, goes to the heart of what we need as humans.  And books are a part of that.

Years later, when Margaret was chaperoning a Brownie excursion for her daughter’s troop, she discovered that several of the girls had been up to exactly the same kind of game she and Ann used to play.  They were acting out scenes from their favorite book, right there, in the enchanted, coastal forest. 

And the book?  To Nowhere and Back. 

What better measure of success for an author of children’s literature than to find that your creation has sparked a whole new generation to play, to create, to dwell.  How can the easily-consumed next big thing, the familiar trope, executed to a tee, the “binge worthy” serial empire, ever compare to that? 

Why do children read?  Many reasons.  But perhaps the more important question is, what does reading give them?  What is its purpose within the greater scope of their development, their arc from the beautiful nothing to the functional something?  Children have magical capacities.  Do these gifts lie forgotten, squandered amid all the consumables of our digital lives?  What will nurture that, if not books?

I now know why children read in my world, and since that’s the only one that I inhabit, I’m good to go.  It’s a relief not be packaging myself, forcing creations into forms only poorly understood, even by the “experts,” and discarded at the first sign of wear.  If we only write to sell, we will never be able to properly answer for what children’s literature can do.   My world may be smaller, as of yet seldom visited, but it is rich and deep, and I’ve taken care to prepare it properly so it can be a place of beauty, meaning and magic.  And maybe, some day, like Margaret, I’ll reap the ultimate reward for my efforts and some child will say, let’s play Vasilisa, and they’ll venture off into a frozen wood in the imagination that is their birth right.

That’s when I’ll know that I’ve truly made it.