Read it to me again! are words familiar to every parent. Have you ever wondered why young children love listening to stories, or why older ones get "last" in books? Or why, despite video games, films, and other electronic media, there is
still something sacred about the ritual of bedtime stories?
In this groundbreaking work, Harvard professor Maria Tatar challenges many of our assumptions about childhood reading.
Much as our culture pays lip service to the importance of literature, we call young readers bookworms, refer to them as addicts or gluttons, and worry about how they always have their nose in a book.
The author of the renowned The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales and The Annotated Brothers Grimm, Tatar leads us on a fascinating and timely exploration of how books cast powerful spells on young readers. For them, words create other worlds: they lead the way through the wardrobe to the snow-covered slopes of Narnia; open the gate to E. B. White's barnyard, where pigs and spiders talk; and direct us to Platform Nine and Three-Quarters, from which the train departs for Hogwarts.
As Tatar explains in mapping the origins of storytelling, stories put children in touch with all the things that adults speak about in hushed tones. The tradition of bedtime reading creates a contact zone between young and old, a safe place where the intoxicating and sometimes terrifying energy of tales from times past is released. For children, reading is less abour identifying with characters and more about witnessing and exploring. Through books, they learn about the mysteries of other minds and discover what it takes to navigate a world.
Child readers rarely live vicariously: as pages turn and dramas unfold, curiosity and compassion are awakened.