Reading Children's Books as an Adult

Three? There are 10 books in the Bagthorpe saga.

The Otterbury Incident is one of my favourite books ever!

I think lots of kids books deal with adult themes really well. Robert Westall’s books set in WWII for example deal with the death of parents and siblings and don’t even get me started on Goodnight Mr Tom!

My favourite is Carrie’s War by Nina Bawden, it’s incredibly deft and subtle and explores issues of family loyalty and betrayal, loneliness, regret, death, religion, the supernatural, disability, misogyny etc etc.

Of course it’s not weird. A book is a book.

In the big scheme of things, it’s only really relatively recently that there was much distinction made between books for children and books for adults.

I’d also say that a lot of the Victorian / Edwardian children’s classics tend to read very similarly to a book for adults from the same period in terms of the actual language used. It’s more just a case of them having child protagonists than being ‘childish’ reads.

The Secret Garden (which is brilliant!) is essentially a gothic novel (and opens with the protagonist being found hiding alone in a house where every single person, including her parents and all the servants, has been found dead from cholera.

Black Beauty is genuinely quite harrowing in parts and well worth reading; it’s excellent.

I have often read children's books as an adult.

I remember when I was in Fifth Form (Y11 in today's money) I was sat behind our English Literature teacher on a school trip and noticed she was reading The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, which surprised me because I had not realised that it was OK for an adult to happily read children's books for pleasure in public! The same teacher read us Barbara Robinson's fabulous The Best Christmas Pageant Ever as an end of term treat.

When DD was young we always read to her before bed. In fact, even though she was a competent reader from quite young we continued the bedtime story until she was about 11. DH and I used to take it in turns to choose and read a book so this very often led to us rediscovering some of our own childhood favourites.

This includes many, many of the ones already mentioned on this thread. But other favourites:

The Children Who Lived In A Barn
Secret Island
Those Dreadful Children
Jennings and Derbyshire books (I remember once laughing so hard while reading this I could hardly speak and DD nearly fell out of bed)
Catweazle
No Boats On Bannermere
Jim Starling and the Colonel
Nearly all the Jill books

DD is all grown up now but I don't need any excuse to revisit these favourites. I recently picked up a copy of The Otterbury Incident in a secondhand shop. Wish I had found that again while she was young.

The Little White horse! Thank you! I've had this memory of that book for years but couldn't remember its name and desperately wanted to reread it

I also loved her book Green Dolphin Country which I don't think is a children's book as such but I read it and loved it as a child

I read all of Roald Dahl’s children’s books as an adult - as a teen I only knew him as the author of the Tales of the Unexpected books which I read back then.
Some of the best books I’ve read in recent years were recommended by my teenage daughter- The Children of Eden trilogy, Ruby and the Smoke series and SeaBEAN to name just three.

I started re-reading my childhood books when I had Covid a couple of years ago and had bad brain fog; then I carried on reading the ones I didn’t read as a child.
Favourites include:
Stig of the Dump
Moondial
Tom’s Midnight Garden
Five Children and It
The Treasure Seekers
The Children of Green Knowe
All the Rosemary Sutcliffe books
Harry Potter series
Saddle Club
Babysitters’ Club
For Christmas I asked for the full set of all the Beatrix Potter books. Absolutely delightful.

It is. It was a book that my late mum gave me when I was a child and, having lost my original copy, I rebought it a few years ago. EG is very underrated as a writer I think.

I've done it! Nothing amiss here 😊

My DD10 and I recently read Henrietta’s House also by Elizabeth Gouge because my daughter loves the Little White Horse so much, it’s also lovely!

Oh my gosh the bagthorpes! So funny. I’m going to raid my parents’ house for these when I’m next there. The one at the haunted house in wales made me laugh so much I was sick when I was a kid!

I reread DWJ all the time. I loved her as a child but maybe even more so as an adult!

I do read a lot of children’s books even in my forties, some with my kids and some on my own. For example although I read the Anne of Green Gables and the Emily of New Moon books as a kid (and have loved them ever since) as an adult I’ve read and really enjoyed other LM Montgomery books for the same age group (finished Pat of Silver Bush yesterday!). I think it’s partly because children’s books are often more inventive and less trammelled by genre than adults books but also because I find childhood in general and the experience of being a child really interesting so I like reading about it.

I can't get on with ebooks unfortunately, lose all focus when reading on a screen.

I love reading children’s books. Many of the ones listed above were absolute staples for me as a child growing up in the 1960s. Others I remember enjoying, that I don’t think anyone has yet mentioned, were Moonfleet, the Just So Stories, the Dr Dolittle books, the Paddington books and the Mary Poppins books. Lots of people have mentioned The Secret Garden and A Little Princess but my favourite book by Frances Hodgson Burnett was The Lost Prince.

My absolute favourites though were The Wind on the Moon by Eric Linklater and The Twilight of Magic by Hugh Lofting. I re-read those two every few years.

I loved introducing my children to books I had read, but I also loved discovering more modern ones with them, in particular Harry Potter and numerous books by Michael Morpurgo and Eva Ibbotson.

To be fair I have only seen the modern version called Flicka - where Ken has become female!

There is apparently a contemporary version, which might be better...

I read the December and Christmas chapters every Christmas!

@UnusualOtter what a coincidence!

I re read that a couple of months ago. Along with The Silver Sword

A Country Child by Alison Uttley was the book that drew me away from Enid Blyton and onto more diverse reading. I still have a copy and reread it.

I read most of the classics as a child but often re-read them especially The Children of Green Knowe, The Dark is Rising and A Country Child (Alison Uttley).

Some that I only read as an adult (not counting some I read to the DC but wouldn't have read myself like Swallows and Amazons)

• the sequels to What Katy Did, What Katy Did at School and What Katy Did Next - can't remember what they are called
• all the sequels to Wolves of Willoughby Chase written after The Stolen Lake
• Diane Wynne Jones' Howl's Moving Castle and sequels, all the Chrestomanci books (apart from Witch Week which I did read as a child), Archer's Goon
• A few of the Susan books I hadn't read like Susan's Trying Term
• Of course, Harry Potter

The Little White Horse is a lovely book I read many times. Will now look for a copy to read again. The film with Colin Firth is awful so don't let that put you off.

I also loved The Children Who Lived in a Barn, read it a few years ago and it was tosh.

have you read her 'adult' book 'Madensky Square? This is actually my all time favourite book. It's so funny, the characters are so warmly drawn. I bought it in a charity shop, finished it and booked myself a trip to Vienna (twice) thanks to this book.

I have just bought The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, The Diddakoi and Which witch? for a friends children. All favourites!

I adored Lucy Mangen's book, most of our obsessions were the same except for her missing out Helen Cresswell's Bagthorpe Saga - the funniest three books of all time.

I bought that for my DCs and read it relatively recently to my Ds when he was about 13. he thought it was 'childish' as Anna was aged 10 and he was 13. But we sobbed through it. The deaths of Pumpel and Onkel Julius undid us.

I am an avid reader (did Russian literature for one of my undergrad degrees). But i love reading my old favourite children books

I've just started Voyage of the Dawn Treader again.
I constantly re-read pony books- the Jill books, the Jinny books, and Linda Craig mysteries.
The Harry Potters are a comfort read.
The Secret Garden is another comfort read for me. I used to re-read Little Women as well often but went off that recently, Too pious for me now. Also love A Little Princess.

Happy days.