I Love Classic Children's Books

I have a secret. I love to read children's classics.

When I was in college I took a Children's Literature course. We had to read, analyze, and write essays on classic children's literature. The book we were required to buy was called Classics of Children's Literature, edited by John W. Griffith and Charles H. Frey. The book contains classic fairy tales (the kind that don't always have happy endings,) The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Little Women, Treasure Island, The Secret Garden, The Wind in the Willows, Peter Pan, and even The Tale of Peter Rabbit, and excerpts from Winnie the Pooh. There are other stories, of course, but those are my favorites. I still have the book; its page ends are folded and tattered from wear, and many of the stories are littered with the marks of a hard working student of literature - notes and thoughts hastily scrawled in the all too narrow margins, and underlined sentences noting symbolism, style and theme.

This is one of the many books that has a permanant spot on my nightstand. Several times a year, I crack it open and read a new story. Believe it or not, I still have not read them all.

I love how well written the stories are. The sentences are complex, the vocabulary is challenging, and the dialect is masterfully interwoven into the plot. When I look at children's literature today, even young adult literature (and for that matter, adult novels as well), I am hard pressed to find anything that is crafted so well. Don't get me wrong, there are many good stories out there, but that is where it stops - at the story level. A good story is wonderful, but what happened to quality literature? Where has the craft of writing gone? Where is the dialect, the figurative language, the sophisticated vocabulary, the description, and the long well-crafted sentence so common in the yesteryear? My biggest fear is that I may already know the answer to this question - such a masterpiece would never sell in today's society.

That being said, I look to children's classics as one of my sources of quality literature when I get the itch to read something that stimulates my mind and satisfies my strange, but unceasing hunger for inspired, formal and grammatically correct prose. Call me a language snob if you will, but the sound of a good classic is music to my ears. And the best part of children's literature (yes, even the language snob sometimes starts a sentence with "and") is that the stories are delightful and entertaining to read.

As an added bonus, those of you who share my occasionally warped sense of humor may find pleasure in the fact that Little Red Riding-hood does indeed get eaten up by the wolf at the end of the classic Perrault fairy tale. Come on, she should know better than to talk to strangers, right?

Bea