Give Yourself Permission to Read Like a Kid Again
What I Learned From Re-Reading My Childhood Favorites in 2020
There has certainly been a lot to read about during 2020, and, depending on your circumstances, a lot of time to read about it.
When the pandemic began, I was finishing up my last months of college. My reading diet consisted of books for my lit analysis class and research-based papers to support my thesis. Really, it was a microcosm of what I had been reading for the past four years of my undergraduate career: books that were challenging and “literary” and that answered real-time questions I had about culture, politics, and philosophy.
Don’t get me wrong — I love reading that type of stuff. But by May, when I had wrapped up my classes, wrote “the end” on my thesis, and virtually graduated, I was burnt out.
I missed how it felt to read when I was kid. I longed for distraction and transportation, for utter immersion, no-strings-attached. So I scoured the dusty shelves of my parents’ basement, looked up deals on audiobooks and ebooks, and set myself up to re-read all of my childhood favorites.
What We Can Learn from Children’s Books
Hint: the same things we can learn from adult books.
There’s a tired stereotype in the literary and academic worlds that it is unproductive for adults to actively read books written for children. I’m not making this up — I once heard an admired writer (who wrote, unsurprisingly, for ‘adults’) say that the majority of children’s books suffered from an absence of narrative logic and were cosmetically lacking. Suffered. Lacking. The language of deficiency.
It’s an incredibly derogatory point of view that devalues the imaginations and critical minds of a whole generation of humans. Kids need to be given more credit. And if we are to do that, adults need to stop looking down on other adults who read (or write) literature intended for them.
When I call to mind my favorite books from when I was a kid (Howl’s Moving Castle, The Tale of Despereaux, Anne of Green Gables, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Holes), I think first of the way those stories made me feel. And that brings me to the first lesson I realized after re-reading the tales of my youth:
1. Emotional Intelligence is Actually Pretty Important
Now, I’m in the camp that stories don’t need to have a cut-and-dry ‘moral’ at the end of their narrative arcs. Reading, especially children’s literature, should not be with the end goal of a lesson learned — but I do think it should teach us something about ourselves, and often that involves the development of our emotional intelligence.
This can best be illustrated by considering the themes of our favorite kid’s books. Take Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones. It’s about a girl named Sophie with low confidence who is cursed by a witch to look and feel elderly. But what begins as a curse is really a boon in the end, because as an old woman, Sophie learns to speak her mind, forge her own path, and accept that others might love her, too.
Themes of destiny, youth, courage, and love pervade Howl’s Moving Castle and are integral to the main character’s progression. When I first read about Sophie and Howl’s adventures, I was nine and battling my own insecurities and self-doubts. The simple objectives, heartfelt intentions of the characters, and — yes, I’ll say it — happy ending gave me some hope for myself.
At the beginning of the novel, Sophie sees herself as growing old alone, isolated, and unremarkable. But she embraces change, takes war and bodily limits in stride, and lives to see the light. And as I was re-reading it during the pandemic, after being unemployed for a spell and isolated from my friends and community, it made me see more potential in my own future. A world beyond the Wastes.
2. The Value of Escapism & Embracing Your Inner Child
I re-read Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables towards the end of the summer, as the air was cooling and the ground was becoming crunchy with leaves and pinecones. Anne’s bright optimism and reverence for the natural world motivated me to take more hikes, to walk through a quiet woods and find beautiful things in the shrubbery: shiny beetles and perfect acorns and fallen trees thick with moss.
“I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers,” Anne exclaims to Marilla at the onset of fall. And I realized: despite all the havoc that 2020 had wreaked on the world, Octobers still existed. This year couldn’t take that away from us.
Anne’s love of nature allows her to ease her anxieties and remember what is truly important in her life. She honors her environment by naming all of the lakes and lanes in and around Green Gables. She escapes to fantastical worlds in her imagination, horrifies herself and Diana in the Haunted Woods, welcomes spring on a mayflower picnic. At the orphanage, she was not allowed to be a child, so when Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert welcome her into their home, she wastes no time in living out her every daydream.
“Isn’t it splendid to think of all the things there are to find out about? It just makes me feel glad to be alive — it’s such an interesting world. It wouldn’t be half so interesting if we know all about everything, would it? There’d be no scope for imagination then, would there?”
I think what attracts me the most to Anne is that, while initially resistant to growing up and fearful that the things she wanted as a child would not be “half so wonderful” once she got them, she realizes that she does not need to let go of her childhood self to mature.
In the latter half of the novel, when she is 16 and about to set off to Queen’s Academy, she says:
“I’m not a bit changed — not really. I’m only just pruned down and branched out. The real ME — back here — is just the same.”
Something about that calmed me. I think it’s natural for every recent college graduate to experience a period of limbo or disconnection as their expectations, career, and sense of self collide in the quote-unquote real world. Add on top of that a global pandemic — and, well, one’s sense of so-called purpose or identity can feel like mud between your fingers.
But Anne, still a child herself, saw herself moving on in life as not contingent on immediate change. I didn’t have to lose myself in the transition. Even if that period of transition would last for an entire locked-down year.
We’ve all been pruned down to an extent in 2020. It’s just a matter of time (and vaccinations…) until we can branch out.
3. There’s No Sense in Feeling Guilty for Liking What You Like
There was a time when I reduced my love for speculative fiction and children’s literature to “a guilty pleasure.” A self-assessment intended to divert the scrutiny — or what I supposed to be scrutiny — of my professors and peers.
I don’t do that anymore. I’ve come to realize that I can equally enjoy a solid, “literary” novel and a fantastic fairytale. One does not have aesthetic or even scholarly precedence over the other. One is not more “moral.”
A story that begins with “once upon a time” and ends with “lived happily ever after” may contain just as much courage, compassion, isolation, and philosophy as your Virginia Woolfs, your Chinua Achebes, your Toni Morrisons. All authors I’ve read and loved, for the record.
I think that’s what I always adored about Kate DiCamillo’s The Tale of Despereaux — and why I was drawn to re-read it in the last month of 2020. Despereaux is different from the other mice — he chooses to read books instead of eat them. He becomes enraptured with a fairy tale about a princess and a knight, and from that story learns about chivalry and courage. The elder mice believe he is out of his mind for believing in these ideas. In the end, though, Despereaux’s differences lead him to rely on his wits and inner strength to save himself and the princess.
What sustains Despereaux throughout his adventures? What gives him hope that he will escape the dungeon and save the princess despite being a small, big-eared, sickly mouse? Those stories that his peers deemed “silly” and “absurd.”
“‘Once upon a time,’ he said out loud to the darkness. He said these words because they were the best, the most powerful words that he knew and just the saying of them comforted him.”
Telling stories of fantasy and magic saved Despereaux. In the dungeon, Gregory the Jailer spares Despereaux when the little mouse tells him a story. “Stories are light,” Gregory says. “Light is precious in a world so dark.”
Stories are comfort. Stories are memory. The simple knowledge that “once upon a time” a mouse or a princess or a knight experienced love and heartbreak but lived to tell the tale, and that perhaps, then, you will too is sometimes all you need to get through the darkness.
There’s probably a metaphor in there — about how we should just read books for the sake of reading them instead of “eating” them. I’m not sure what the “eating” would be here. Perhaps a preoccupation with over-analysis and symbol-seeking. Or the tendency to devour literature for its parts rather than enjoying it as a whole. But wouldn’t my finding a metaphor be counterintuitive? The Tale of Despereaux is a lovely story that made me proud to call myself a book-person. And really, enjoying something at face value is as valid a reason as any to like a book.
Go Ahead. Re-read Your Childhood Favorites.
I’m not here to tell you what you will learn by re-reading The Chronicles of Narnia, The Hunger Games, or whatever kid-book rocked your world. All I can say is that, if anything, the books little-you loved will remind you something about yourself and what originally motivated you to read.
Right now, I think we would all benefit by being reminded about our inner child.
By all means, continue to read the think-pieces and the breakout upmarket novels and the oh-so-important political and social commentaries. But remember that it’s ok to step back. It’s ok to read to feel hope and courage, even if that is vicariously through a mouse or an orphan or a cursed girl. These things have value. Your comfort has value.
Give yourself that permission.
