Reading notes: 'Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise'

In a happy coincidence, I started (and soon finished; it's short) this book yesterday, a few hours after I had written about books, opportunity cost, and the limitations of measuring and valuing books with an opportunity-cost framework. Katherine Rundell gives a much firmer and more eloquent version of that thought here in arguing against reading as a sort of "anxious self-optimization" that (implicitly) leads us away from children's literature. "Anxious self-optimizer" is a pretty solid criticism of me, so I read on with great interest. Rundell argues that children's books connect us uniquely well to hungry, trusting ways of reading. I'd add that I miss the indiscriminate way I read as a child, from reference books to short stories to soup-can labels. One personal irony here is that I've recently been thinking about this kind of reading urge, and the value of semirandom inputs more generally, but from the anxious self-optimizing perspective. Why You Should Read... helps one remember…