Reading Children's Books as an Adult

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I was a fairly avid reader as a child but feel I missed a lot of the children’s classics like Wind in the Willows, The Secret Garden, Black Beauty, Anne of Green Gables etc.

I’m thinking I might read them now as a (fairly mature!) adult. Has anyone else done this? It isn’t too weird is it?!

And if you have done / would do it, are there any books you’d recommend?

Thanks.

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 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.

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

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.

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!

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!

I've done it! Nothing amiss here 😊

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Three? There are 10 books in the Bagthorpe saga.

You would miss SO much if you only read adult books! I find that there is a lot more variety in terms of plot in children's literature, as adult fiction usually revolves around romance and/or crime. I mean, I'll read some adult books (usually non-fiction these days), but that doesn't stop me from reading newer children's books, or ones that I missed during my childhood (which is amazing, because I was constantly reading!). I kept all of my books from childhood (they were the one thing that I always refused to throw out), so I just keep adding to them! If I hadn't, I'd never have discovered the likes of Katherine Rundell or Judith Eagle, or managed to buy every Eva Ibbotson book ever published (I was missing a few), or some of the Chalet School ones (I now have a full set). I am not exempt from browsing children's books in bookshops, either, even in public!

There is something comforting about children's literature that is missing in the adult equivalent!

Wind in the Willows is a beautiful book. I didn’t have it as a child and read it for the first time a few years ago. I found it transported me to a beautiful place and time.
The Hobbit, another beautiful book.
Tarka the Otter and Watership Down were two of my favourite books in childhood, I read when I was about eight. I do intend to re-read some day.
Black Beauty, so poignant, another I love.

When my dd was little, a neighbouring little girl gave us a pile of Jaqueline Wilson’s which we read together and thoroughly enjoyed. I’ve kept our favourites and I bought her latest one which is a sequel to a very old one and the children have grown up.

Ha ha. This reminds me of when I introduced DD to the Little House on the Prairie series.

I honestly thought it was a trilogy: Little House in the Big Woods, LHOTP and On The Banks Of Plum Creek. We read all three and enjoyed them. Then in the school holidays she was staying with PILs and they took her to a second hand book stall on the market and she excitedly texted me to say "I have found the next four books in the Little House trilogy":and I was gobsmacked.

Tom’s midnight garden is my all time favourite and started a lifelong obsession with local history and my garden at night.

I love Eva Ibbotson! I bought a book a Christmas Star as gifts for family members this year. It's so beautiful and unexpected

I have read one Katherine Rundell and loved it and I have more of her books waiting on the bookshelf to read.

I also read the whole way through the Chalet School series a couple of years ago when I was unwell. I gradually acquired and read them in order and it was the most wonderful treat to read the whole series in chronological order

Black Beauty, so poignant, another I love

@HatStickBoots Oh I loved that book so much. I read it over and over as a child.

I remember a girl at school who must have been three years older than me said her Mum wouldn't let her read it as it was too sad. Even at about 8 I thought that was a bit odd. As an adult and a mother myself I think it misguided. DH introduced The Hobbit to DD when she was about 4 and some bits made her cry. I don't think that was a bad thing.

I think he wrote White Boots too. Made me want skating lessons! 😁

The Secret Garden is my favourite book of all time and always will be!

I recommend the website 'World of books ' as a source of inexpensive pre loved children's ( and adult) books. A poster on another thread mentioned it and I managed to get several of my childhood favourites there. Now compiling a list of some more I want to get.

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.

When I re-read E. Nesbit as an adult, I realised that some of the humour had gone right over my head as a child.

The House of Arden was my absolute favourite as a child, though as an adult I can see it's not one of her best.

I often revert to childhood favourites if I want some undemanding comfort reading. I go to fadedpage for bedtime reading.