[supertofu]

This reminds me of the year I really got into reading (5th - 6th grade), and I remember reading: Alice in Wonderland, Little Women, Sideways Stories from Wayside School by Louis Sachar, Black Beauty by Anna Sewell, Julie of the Wolves, the Babysitter's Club, The Giver, Holes, and Captain Underpants. I honestly could go on and on.

These are all wildly different books and I loved them all! At that age, I had no idea what I even wanted from literature. I just asked the Children's Librarian for books and she decided for me. Almost all of these books were plain old good stories.

It took me years to figure out what my reading preferences were. And as I got older, my fiction choices dramatically reduced in breadth. I kind of miss the lack of discernment I had when I was a reader of exclusively Children's Lit.

Now, it's really hard for me to read anything that's not the very specific genre of Psychological Thriller or woman-authored LitFic that I prefer.

I miss just receiving a stack of books and loving whatever I got. That there is the real magic of Children's lit.

[mncharity]

> fiction choices dramatically reduced in breadth [...] hard for me to read anything that's not the very specific genre [...] miss just receiving a stack of books and loving whatever I got

For non-fiction, I much enjoy the breadth-stretching of surfing the New Books shelves at libraries, gathering "oh, that's neat"'s - the bite size making success easier and exploration cost smaller. For fiction... that seems less available. Maybe if one enjoys jumping into the middle of stories? Or exploring the writing itself. On google books, one can search for random words and phrases, and wander the results and Previews. Eg, a random "elephant fiction"[1] has fragments of children's books and history and ...

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=elephant+fiction&tbm=bks