I have been thinking recently about the children’s books that have never left us.
The ones that quietly changed something. The ones that slipped in early and rearranged how the world felt.
And I realised something quite quickly. For me, books were never really an escape from childhood. They were an expansion of it. Books made ordinary life feel charged with possibility.
I can trace that feeling back, quite clearly, to Danny, the Champion of the World. There is something about that book, and many of Roald Dahl’s stories, that captures a very particular childhood truth. The sense that just beneath the surface of ordinary life, there might be something else entirely. That adults are not always what they seem. That rules can be bent. That adventure is not somewhere far away, but quietly waiting in places you already know.
After reading Danny, the world did not look the same.
Petrol stations felt faintly mysterious. Country roads seemed as though they might lead somewhere unexpected. It even made me look at my relationship with my dad differently. I think it strengthened it.
Then came The Hobbit, and later The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and with them that sense expanded further. These were not merely stories you read and set aside. They lingered. They followed you around. They made you look twice at things you would otherwise have ignored.
A patch of woodland was no longer just a patch of woodland, but a place where something might happen. Snow carried a quiet promise. Old houses seemed as though they might be hiding something. Even an ordinary afternoon could take on a slightly cinematic quality, as if it might tip, at any moment, into something more.
That is what I remember most vividly about reading as a child. Not disappearing from the world, but returning to it afterwards with altered eyes.
Children do this instinctively. They do not leave stories behind when they close a book. They carry them out into the world and lay them over their own lives. The boundaries blur. The imagined and the real begin to overlap, and for a while everything feels larger, more vivid, more alive.
I sometimes think we underestimate how powerful that is because, as adults, we tend to talk about reading in very worthy terms. Literacy, concentration, educational value. All important, obviously, but none of them explain why a child falls in love with a book.
Children fall in love with books because certain stories make the world feel bigger. Not safer, necessarily, and not simpler, but more interesting. More charged. More full of possibility.
A road is no longer just a road. A quiet child is no longer limited to being quiet. Books introduce the idea that things can change, that there is more than what you can immediately see, and that you might have a place within that larger world.
And I suspect many of us spend the rest of our lives, in one way or another, trying to get back to that feeling.
Perhaps that is part of why books continue to matter so much in adulthood, and why physical books in particular carry such emotional weight. It is not simply about the story itself, or even the author. It is about what books once did to us, and the hope that they might still be able to do it again.
Because the truth is, books did not help me escape childhood.
They made it feel bigger. Stranger. More alive.
And if I am honest, I think they made me.
Which is why I still recognise it instantly when it happens. When a book makes the world feel slightly different afterwards. Slightly wider. Slightly more alive. Slightly more full of possibility.
Because that is where it begins.
