Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but most important, it finds homes for us everywhere.
-Hazel Rochman
Thoughts on Reading
Age: 10 – 99
A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.
— C. S. Lewis
One of the great benefits of youth fiction is that, when written well, and so many are, any adult can pick a book up, read it and find deep joy in stories that are engaging and delightful. Yes, the characters are almost always ten, eleven and twelve year olds, but the stories often delve into the deep themes of life that touch the human heart. They are well told and leave behind the hubris and unnecessary sensuality of young adult fiction. They are a joy to read aloud to our children as child and adult alike can be drawn into the sometimes fantastical, sometimes heart wrenchingly realistic plots that unfold in so many of the books written for youth.
I remember finding myself unable to continue a chapter near the end of Okay for Now that I had been reading aloud to my kids as I fought back tears. Other books have had me laughing out loud or raging with anger at injustice or simply smiling with joy at the kindness of a character. These books, written for young children, are often some of the best I’ve read. Yes, they can lack the depth of plot of the classics and the sentence structure is usually not as complex as adult fiction, but they are more often than not, just as good.
This is the reason when we review books in this genre we always place the age as: 8, 10, or 12 – 99, though I suppose centenarians can enjoy them as well.
A good place to find these books – aside from our top ten lists – is the John Newbery Medal books. Each year since 1922 they have awarded one winner and any number of Newbery Honor awards to books in the children’s literature genre. You can find the whole list of Newbery winners and honor books here: Newbery Medal
by Aaron G Myers
Thoughts on Reading
To write well, read omnivorously. Those who read constantly tend to write coherently.
– Trish Hall
Thoughts on Reading
Out of school, the child’s work influences him; his playmates affect him more; the example and instruction of his parents form his habits, thought and character to a still greater extent; but more than any one, as much as the three combined, does his time reading shape his destiny.
– Charles H. Sylvester in Journeys Through Bookland (1909)
Thoughts on Reading
Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books — even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome. They seem to tell you that they have got something inside their covers that will be good for you, and that they are willing and desirous to impart to you. Value them much.
– William Gladstone
Thoughts on Reading
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours.
-J. D. Salinger
Thoughts on Reading
A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.
-C.S. Lewis
Thoughts on Reading
Story is the shortest distance between the human heart and truth.
– Ted Dekker
Thoughts on Reading
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin
Thoughts on Reading
The best myths are not deliberately constructed falsehoods but are rather tales woven by people to capture the echos of deeper truths. Myths offer a fragment of that truth, not its totality. They’re like splintered fragments of the true light, yet when the full and true story is told it is able to bring to fulfillment all that was right and wise in those fragmentary visions of things.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Boo Radley Book Reviews 