Author Events, Literature

Children’s books for adults

jacket imageAdults looking for something to read during the American Library Association’s Teen Read Week October 12 to 18 should look no further than Seth Lerer’s Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter. Amid other revelations about teen staples from Judy Blume novels to the Harry Potter series, Lerer shows that the category of Young Adult literature was originally created to keep “offensive” materials off the children’s shelves of libraries.
His breadth, ecompassing centuries of books for children of all ages, virtually guarantees that you’ll discover something new in Children’s Literature about a book you loved as a kid. Chicagoans can even make those discoveries in person, when Lerer presents his book tonight at the Newberry Library (which, on a related note, currently has a great exhibition featuring its collection of children’s books–700 years worth of them). If you’re not able to make it, you can at least console yourself with this excerpt.