Reading notes: 'Make Believe'

Here is Mac Barnett's Make Believe, a small wonderful book about how important children's literature is, and how often we fail at it. Here as elsewhere, the fact that children often have different needs from adults shouldn't keep us from considering whether what is appropriate for one group is appropriate for another. Barnett is exactly right to point out that we're much too didactic in the literature we make for and give to children, and that one symptom of this is that we do not in general apply such a didactic approach to literature for adults. That said, Barnett might be underestimating the level of didacticism in the books adults are giving to themselves these days. The extended discussion of Margaret Wise Brown is wonderful. Not long ago I read John Carey's The Accidental Professor, which includes a brief summary of his criticism of the modernists: roughly, that they were too often intentionally inaccessible, which is fundamentally undemocratic. This must be a complicated story,…