Top 5 Children's Books to Read as Adults

       *Note* Top 5 Wednesday is a Goodreads group where blogger/vloggers post about a bookish topic every Wednesday. You can check it out right here. https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/118368-top-5-wednesday

     All these books I have either read as an older teenager or an adult. It is a very different experience reading a book as a child and re-reading as an adult vs reading a children’s books as an adult for the first time.

5. The Tale of Despereaux

      My older brother brought nine-year-old me to see the movie based on this novel, and I haven’t seen it since and don’t plan on doing so anytime soon. I didn’t even know there was a book until I saw the author, Kate DiCamillo, interviewed on a television show called The World Over.  Hearing the author speak of her books piqued my interest in the novel so I checked it out at my local library. The story was actually very sweet and well-paced and the prose was easy for a child to understand, but not dumbed down to the point of being insulting. As I read this book for the first time as a fifteen-year-old I realized, if I had books like this when I was a child, I would’ve read for sure. I did read all the time anyway, as a child, but I would have read even more.

4. The Hobbit

     When my older brothers were all in high school, they were hooked on The Lord of the Rings and I wasn’t allowed to read or watch it until I was older. To keep me satisfied until then, my mother gave me The Hobbit, the predecessor to The Lord of the Rings. Reading The Hobbit as an adult I was able to appreciate the world building a whole lot more and link some of the events of the story to the myths that inspired Tolkien. Not to brag or anything, but I can name all 13 dwarves from this book.

3. The Horse and His Boy

     This is my mother’s favorite book, and she was in a hurry to get her children through the first two Narnia books so we could read this one. I first heard The Horse and His Boy through an audio book while my family was on the way to a vacation in Canada. I don’t remember remembering much from the story, but I do remember liking it. Once I was able to read at the level these books were written in, I loved it.  Going through this as an adult I picked up Easter Eggs from previous books and foreshadowing for events in the later books. This is the only book that takes place while Lucy, Edmund, Susan, and Peter are in Narnia and we get to see what life is like in other countries.

2. The Crystal Snowstorm

      This entire story is beautiful and sadly very obscure. It is about an adolescent girl, Kathrine, who finds herself caught in the late 19^th century when pretty much every country in Europe was revolting. We get to see what political turmoil looks like through a child’s eyes, but it isn’t heavy. When reading this books as a child I was mostly stuck in Kathrine’s head and didn’t notice anything that she didn’t think of. However, as an adult, I read what Kathrine does and what happens in the world around her and I realize, I would rather stick my finger in an electric pencil sharpener than have my child go through that. 

1. The Hidden Treasure of Glaston

     When I was in middle school, I hated “Quest for the Holy Grail” stories. It was mostly because I felt many modern interpretations of this trope completely overlook the religious elements to it.  This isn’t at all how the author handles this story. When I read this in middle school I was in with the two leads and I would think of the clues they read and tried to figure them out for myself. The amount of historical accuracies, that aren’t needed because the story is already very good on its own, were beautiful and brought tears to my history nerd eyes.