Easley Library Bookworms discussion

Because BC has a long-established teacher training program, which requires a course in children's literature, Easley Library has a pretty strong children's collection. It not only supports the curriculum in education, but provides recreational reading for the kids of faculty and community members, and support for their school assignments. But increasingly, BC students, faculty and staff are finding it a rewarding venue for their own reading as well.

Libraries traditionally divide their children's collection into E and J books, Easy Readers (picture books for very little children) and Juvenile or Junior books for the older kids. Some also have a YA (Young Adult) section for teens. Our J section includes books that would be appropriate for both J or YA. Many of the fiction (and perhaps even some nonfiction) books in that section, though, are perfectly appropriate for adults to read as well. My wife and I have both found some great reads there, and I've got my eye on still more books from those shelves. So these might well be worth your time to investigate!

C. S. Lewis, in his essay "On Three Ways of Writing for Children," (which is included in one of the posthumous collections of his writings that we have here in the library, Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories), had some comments that are relevant to this thread:

"Where the children's story is simply the right form for what the author has to say, then of course readers who want to hear that, will read the story or re-read it, at any age. I never met The Wind in the Willows or the Bastable books till I was in my late twenties, and I do not think I have enjoyed them any the less on that account. I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children's story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children's story. The good ones last.... the neat sorting out of books into age-groups, so dear to publishers, has only a very sketchy relation with the habits of any real readers. Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us. No reader worth his salt trots along in obedience to a time-table."

That whole essay is actually well worth reading as a background to our topic here. So is another (and much shorter) essay in the same collection, "On Juvenile Tastes."