April
22
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Reading Like a Kid by Tania Unsworth
A few years ago I decided to stop writing for adults and try writing books for children instead. There were several reasons for this but the most important was a realization that felt both simple and very important:
I don’t read the way I used to read when I was a kid.
On one level this fact seems almost too obvious to point out. Of course I read differently now! I’m an adult. I’ve studied books and I’ve written them and I’ve read far, far too many to count since I was a girl of eleven, with a flashlight under the covers, devouring The Chronicles of Narnia. As an adult, it’s hardly breaking news that I read with a depth and critical awareness that I simply didn’t possess as a child.
But that isn’t the real point.
What I realized was that although I love books almost more than anything else in the world, there are probably only a handful I have read as an adult that I would say changed my life. And even then – speaking honestly – the changes to my life have been fairly modest. Reading A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf at the age of twenty-two, for example, certainly challenged my way of thinking, but did it do more than that? If I had missed out on Ishiguru’s Never Let Me Go, to take another example, my life would definitely have been the poorer. But would it have really mattered that much?
I know there are plenty of people who will disagree with this, pointing to books that profoundly and demonstrably altered the course of their adult lives, but speaking personally, the books that had the greatest and most lasting impact on me were all read before the age of fifteen.
Am I the only one who feels this?
And am I the only one who thinks that as reading experiences go, very little can beat being eleven years old and reading The Chronicles of Narnia under the covers by flashlight?
Or being half way through Night Birds on Nantucket by Joan Aiken with enough pear drops (if sucked very slowly) to last you through to the end?
Or realizing that The Finn Family Moomintroll is actually just one book in a whole series?
There was an intensity to reading then, a kind of total involvement in story that is hard to reproduce as an adult. I know too much now about tired plots and clichés. I am always comparing one thing to another, recognizing devices, identifying styles. No matter how good or bad I find something, I’m always aware of my response, slightly detached, consciously enjoying or not enjoying.
That’s how it should be. I’m an adult after all. But I do sometimes long to read the way I used to.
Sometimes I think that it was as close to words as I have ever been. And sometimes, when I’m feeling particularly melancholy, I wonder whether the books I admire as an adult are simply the ones that manage to capture – however fleetingly – some sense of that old intensity, that first love.
So I decided to stop writing for adults and try writing for children instead.
My first book for children THE ONE SAFE PLACE (Algonquin) comes out on April 29th.
I wonder what took me so long.
Tania Unsworth grew up thinking that being a writer was the best thing in the world to be. Her dad was a writer, and her family traveled around Greece and Turkey until she was seven. Those years were wonderful, full of color and adventure. But because her family moved around a lot, she was never really sure where her home was. Ever since then, she’s been caught between wanting to roam the world and wanting to stay safe. Her writing often reflects this.
She spent the rest of her childhood in England. She didn’t like school but she read a lot. Every year for Christmas, she wrote a story for her dad. They were just short little things, but because she wrote them in an exercise book and numbered the pages, she could pretend they were real novels. Sometimes she had to write using VERY LARGE letters to fill up the space.
Later she worked in a bookshop and then on the features desk of a women’s magazine. In the UK, she’s published two novels for adults. The One Safe Place is her first book for children.
Tania lives in Boston with her husband, two sons, a dog called Plum, and a pair of cats.
Nerdy Book Club 
Congratulations on your first children’s book! I can’t wait to read it!
I hope you enjoy it, Tyler!
As an adult, I keep a reading log, how many books this month, this year? What new authors? What books did I re-read? What books have I stopped re-reading? I don’t have to worry when my brain’s in a jumble – it’s all there in my book log.
When I was a child, I didn’t need a log. I devoured the children’s room at the public library and I knew what I’d read, what I wanted to read when it came back in, what I loved, what authors were fillers, what authors were treasures.
It’s spring. Yesterday my husband and I were at a nursery, looking at vegetables, flowers and herbs. When he liked the looks of the Chintz Thyme, I mentioned we’d bought some German Thyme two weeks ago. Suddenly I found myself telling him the story of Edward Eager’s The Time Garden.
Last evening a friend told me she had to dust her house – it was so thick with dust she could plant a garden. Suddenly I found myself telling her Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s “The Radish Cure” by Betty MacDonald.
Childhood books stick. The important ones stick harder.
Dibs, 67, Masters in Comparative Lit.
Your post makes me grateful to work as a librarian serving children 4-14. So much work to be done…but if I’m doing it well I might really help kids & books connect to create some lasting impressions! Ty!
I’ve thought about this often, and I also truly miss those childhood feelings of profound hope and excitement that books brought. They really were life changing. One of the few times I felt that as an adult was when I read THE BONE PEOPLE by Keri Hulme in college. Congratulations on your new book for children!
I loved The Bone People too – incredibly powerful.
Congratulations!! Just jumped on Amazon and looked inside: what a beginning — can’t wait to read more!
Some of the intense impact of children’s books has to do — I think — with the newness of everything to us at those ages. And, too, with the fact that we live so much less in our intellect as kids, and more as emotional, bodily beings with five VERY active and engaged senses.
Although what does that say about those of us who still enjoy reading children’s books so much as adults? (On that account, I think there is something to the idea that children’s books — as Kate DiCamillo says — “demand hope”. Which has appeal. Hope, especially as we careen towards a world that could end up being frighteningly akin to the one in your novel, is so necessary.
(And about THE BONE PEOPLE: that was probably the most emotional read of my adult life, too!)
I think one reason children’s books are appealing to adults is that in children’s books, story is all important. It has to be or kids will simply stop reading. That’s not always true for adult fiction.
Very interesting article, and I agree: the books that changed my life were “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “The Phantom Tollbooth”.
Your point even deepens the impact of the “Harry Potter” series beyond its initial publishing success: the messages of those books, from a healthy distrust of authority for authority’s sake, and of magic, and of loyalty, have profoundlyn impacted an entire generation very very deeply.
Congratulations on your book!
i think what struck me most was your observation that the books i keep turning to, and keep looking for, are the ones that help me recapture that feeling again, and help me lose the detachment – i am right there with you.
I’m 60 and I still read like a child. As one friend said, sometimes I look at the page and I’m surprised to see words. I still get that joy to discover a series, I still get so absorbed that it is a shock to come back to the real world. So there is hope that you will be able to read like a child again.
Love this commentary. A few years ago I began seeking books I vividly remembered reading in my small-town public library. What joy to reread and (sometimes) a bit of disappointment. All instructive as to who I was then and who I am now. I can still fall into a book and yes, you must have hope–not just for the book but for life. And yes, The Bone People was incredibly memorable but I’m not sure it really changed my life.
Yes! Finally someone writes about best way to start
writing a book.