When I was young, inhabiting the world inside a book was as easy as breathing. I loved them all: girlhood classics like Little Women and The Secret Garden; the magical canon of Narnia, Earthsea and Middle Earth. Animal books, wilderness adventures, teenage detectives – so many worlds and people to discover. To quote my English professor grandfather, sometime in childhood, reading becomes like a rollercoaster – you just get on and go.
But during the pandemic, my reading rollercoaster ground to a halt. I live in a house filled with books, but in the long winter nights of lockdown, I’d find myself wandering restlessly, picking up and putting down volume after volume, unable to settle. It turns out I was not alone. Other formerly avid readers were confessing the same thing, and the same fear: would we ever read again?
It started back up slowly. An article about re-reading The Secret Garden was shared widely. Little Women trended as a pandemic comfort read. Booksellers noticed more adults buying children’s books – for themselves. Somehow, it seems we all had the same intuition, that the books we loved long ago contain something we desperately need today. Not a regression to childhood (although, would that be a bad thing?) but the restoration of hope and a spirit of adventure.
As writer Katherine Rundell says in this week’s show, “The best children’s books acknowledge the darkness of the world but they allow themselves to be hopeful. Children’s books try to tell truths; it is an adult phenomenon to forget that hope is a truth.”
Happy reading!
–Anne