Tania Unsworth considers the joys of “reading like a kid”:
[A]lthough I love books almost more than anything else in the world, there are probably only a handful I have read as an adult that I would say changed my life. And even then – speaking honestly – the changes to my life have been fairly modest. Reading A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf at the age of 22, for example, certainly challenged my way of thinking, but did it do more than that? If I had missed out on Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, to take another example, my life would definitely have been the poorer. But would it have really mattered that much?
I know there are plenty of people who will disagree with this, pointing to books that profoundly and demonstrably altered the course of their adult lives, but speaking personally, the books that had the greatest and most lasting impact on me were all read before the age of fifteen. Am I the only one who feels this? … There was an intensity to reading then, a kind of total involvement in story that is hard to reproduce as an adult. I know too much now about tired plots and clichés. I am always comparing one thing to another, recognizing devices, identifying styles. No matter how good or bad I find something, I’m always aware of my response, slightly detached, consciously enjoying or not enjoying. That’s how it should be. I’m an adult after all. But I do sometimes long to read the way I used to.
The Dish 