Award-winning children’s book writer and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, Katherine Rundell, explores how children’s books ignite, and can re-ignite, the imagination; how children’s fiction, with its unabashed emotion and playfulness, and awaken old hungers and create new perspective on the world. This delightful and persuasive essay is for adult readers.

Why aren’t children’s books seen as part of literature? Why would most adults feel embarrassed to be caught reading a young adult classic? When we leave children’s book behind, we do so at our peril, suggests Rundell, “for we discard in adulthood a casket of wonders that, read with an adult eye, have a different kind of alchemy in them.”

She is certainly not suggesting that adults should read only, or even mostly, children’s fiction: “Just that there are some times in life when it might be the only thing that will do.

Infinitely wise and thought-provoking, Rundell’s short-book is a perfect one-sitting read, with its passionate, persuasive and perceptive,  is a terrific gift for the book-lover in your life.

Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise by Katherine Rundell, Penguin Random House, $17.99, 80 pages.