C.S. Lewis On Summer Reading
When parents ask me for book recommendations for their kids to read over the summer it is usually because they are facing one of two problems: 1) Their child reads ferociously and they have no idea how to find enough good books to throw in front of them, or 2) their child does not like to read at all, and they wish they knew how to find any book that will actually compel them to sit down, read, and finally be quiet. The child in problem one likely ends up choosing their own books without much guidance, and the child in problem two comes to believe that they just aren't the kind of person who reads. Many households have one (or both!) of these kids in their house during the summer, and many parents believe they are lacking some secret wisdom needed to help their burgeoning readers.
In both cases, the problem can be solved by answering the following questions: What actually makes a children’s book good? And how can I (the parent) find the good ones? So I will do my best to help you keep your children occupied (and quiet) this summer by providing a standard, borrowed from the great C.S. Lewis, by which you can easily learn to measure the worthiness of your children’s summer reading options.
A Good Children’s Book is Just a Good Book
Parents often assume that because they are grown adults without childish sensibilities, they are not qualified to judge a book that is written for children (Note: When I say “children’s book” in this article I am referring to books for children of all ages, teenagers included). They assume that as long as kids enjoy it, it does not matter if they like it at all. Fortunately, this is not true! In his essay On Three Ways of Writing for Children, C.S. Lewis rightly says that “a children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story.” According to Lewis, the author who is writing a children’s book because he has decided that he wants children to read his book does not end up writing a good book — and if it is not a good book, then it is not a good children’s book. The poor author “conceives of writing for children as a special department of ‘giving the public what it wants,’” and so he is too concerned with appealing to his particular audience to create something truly worth saying to all audiences.
Books written for this purpose ultimately project what the author imagines kids are interested in hearing these days. The book becomes a mirror that children look into and see what they already are and like and want, or worse, what some author thinks they already are and like and want. While these kinds of books are not always insidious, they fail to engage and populate the moral imagination of our children. We want our children to read good books that draw them in instead of weak books that pander to their childishness.
Rather than pleading for their attention by flatly appealing to their pre-existing interests and experiences, a good book points children towards true, good, and beautiful things beyond what they already know — it expands their imaginations by saying “enter into this world that is completely unfamiliar to you and learn to think something that you couldn’t possibly think on your own!”
By engaging the imagination in this way, a good book invokes what C.S. Lewis would consider a deeply positive longing. Lewis notes that this does not make the child dissatisfied with himself and his own world once he has finished the book, but rather it “arouses a longing for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new ‘dimension of depth. He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted. This is a special kind of longing.”
Although Lewis is specifically talking about Fairy-tales, this idea is true for all books that your kids are reading. Truth revealed in any good book equips and motivates children to find and defend that truth in their own life. The child who is consistently reading Fairy-Tales moves through the world with a longing to encounter all that is “enchanted” in the “real woods” of the world. In much the same way, the teenager who spends all summer reading Jane Austen will eagerly start the school year longing (perhaps subconsciously) to practice empathy in their friendships.
This longing is a part of something larger — an awakening sensitivity to goodness, truth, and beauty that adds “depth” to the real world they live in and predisposes them to search for The Great Thing that “all real woods” and all of the rest of the world is “enchanted” with: the mysterious and profound Love of Christ. This is the central project of the education we provide here at Chapel Field, but this project is active and ongoing even at home as your children pick books to read over the summer.
Read What They Read
So as parents and teachers we must raise our expectations for children’s books. Even with the wisdom of C.S. Lewis that I have referenced above, however, we cannot do so without cultivating and trusting our own taste. If a good children’s book is just a good book, then adults are not actually handicapped and unable to judge children’s books just because they are not children! If you pick up a book your child is reading and think, “This is terrible!” — it probably is. It almost definitely does not have some kind of secret value that can only be accessed by the 10 year old mind. And what's more, there are many books, both old and new, that are worthy of their precious summer hours and capable of being the very thing that makes them more precious. And they are not that hard to find. The more we read what our children read, the better we will become at finding them.
I am not saying that every parent needs to read every book that their kids are reading, or that parents need to be reading constantly. I am saying that parents should be reading and investigating the books available to their children just enough to have some sense of what they themselves think is good and bad. The goal is to be able to tell which books were written just because the author is trying to get your kids to read their books, and which books were written because the author discovered something fantastic in the “woods” of their story and your kids are fortunate enough to be a ready audience.
Start with the Classics
In the interest of helping you find books like this for your child to read this summer, I have compiled a short and woefully incomplete list of classics (and some modern classics) that we do not currently teach in our English classes. Though I have loosely arranged these titles by reading level, in the interest of keeping summer separate from school, these books are not exceptionally challenging. (The lists below are drawn from “Center for Lit Schools,” John Senior’s “1000 Good Books,” and myself).
Remember, there are many books to read beyond this list! Good books are still being written all the time. These are just a good place to start as you and your kids hone your ability to discern between the good and the bad, the enchanting and the pandering, the timeless and the time-wasting. Happy reading and happy summer!
Elementary/Middle School Readers:
The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo,
The Redwall series by Brian Jacques,
The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander,
The Cricket in Times Square by George Selden,
The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall,
The Indian in the Cupboard by Lynne Reid Banks,
Straw into Gold by Gary Schmidt,
Holes by Louis Sachar,
The Door in the Wall by Marguerite de Angeli,
Black Beauty by Anna Sewell,
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett,
Anything written by the great Roald Dahl,
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle,
The Bronze Bow by Elizabeth George Speare,
Carry On, Mr. Bowditch by Jean Lee Latham,
The Yearling by Marjorie Rawlings,
The Giver by Lois Lowry,
Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt.
Middle/High School Readers:
Okay for Now by Gary Schmidt,
Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne,
At the Back of the North Wind by George MacDonald,
The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy,
Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery,
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott,
The Cricket on the Hearth by Charles Dickens,
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas,
Pride and Prejudice and/or Emma by Jane Austen,
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë,
The Chosen by Chaim Potok,
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas,
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells,
Father Brown series by G.K. Chesterton,
Tom Brown’s School Days by Thomas Hughes,
Peace Like a River by Leif Enger,
Everything Sad Is Untrue by Daniel Nayeri,
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien.
Henry Listenberger serves as Academic Dean at Chapel Field and teaches Elementary and Middle School Literature classes.
