Oh, for heaven's sake
Adults who enjoy reading children's books are "retreating from the disappointment of life", according to a Cambridge University academic.
Like all books for 'grown-ups' are about life-is-real-life-is-earnest and Deep Thoughts, as opposed to comfort reading, time-passing, wish-fulfilment and escapism.*
Plus, nul points for someone who is at one of the premier universities in the UK, and possibly the world, who can describe the Alice books as about 'world where self-consciousness is overthrown and relationships are straightforward'. Has she ever read them? Alice is intensely self-conscious, and what is straightforward about relationships with head-chopping queens, babies that become pigs, etc?
And on The Wind in the Willows as some lovely haven, I found the episode in which Mole smells his old home really quite upsetting when I was a child (I might still do), and what about 'The Piper at the Gate of Dawn' chapter, eh? eh?
Anyhow, what is wrong with escapism and comfort?
Sometimes I get the feeling that some people who go into Lit Studies as their academic field never actually read for fun and don't quite see that that might be the point of it. As was pointed out in The Readers' Room in Guardian G2 yesterday: 'but sometimes prose isn't all about the facts. Sometimes it's just there to entertain us'.
*Once in conversation I defined Jeffrey Archer's novels as Enid Blyton for grown-ups, but we all agreed that that was completely unjust to Enid.
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