Fiction for children

In the annual start of summer fiction issue of the New Yorker several writers contribute essays under the common banner "childhood reading". An intriguing theme for net between a handful of the essays is that "children's literature" is really whatever children read. Some of these writers grew up with what would be considered mature stories like Moby Dick and Robinson Crusoe. Others, like the reader of The Secret Garden, remarks that its themes of abandonment, cholera, and regret make it heavy handed compared to most modern young adult lit. 

Other contributors experienced lit through everything but reading. Listening to tapes, listening to people, looking up words in the dictionary, (these are the reflections of someone who immigrated at two and didn't write strongly as a child). 

What Rivka Galchen notes is that her memories of what she read are not from books, but from 

"The mysterious “Banacol” stickers on the apples [my mother] peeled for me, the Royal Dansk Danish Butter Cookies tin, mailings from Ed McMahon, deputized to me, which might make us millions, my parents’ odd names on checks that had pale mountain ranges in the background, mountain ranges that I had been invited to select myself, from the sheet of so many options."

What do you remember reading when you were young? 

I remember reading the cereal box, even more than the activities the nutrition facts, whose scientific words and units of measure (g) meant nothing to me, except how they compared to the corresponding values on Tess's box. 

I remember learning (it was certainly a long and subconscious process) that names were misleading sometimes, like at The Topsham Fair Mall, which was not a mall and was not fair. Part of its uninspired sprawl was the Fairground Cafe, which also inspired confidence and also was a disappointment with its un embellished tune salad on cold white bread. 

 Bananas that were as green as my favorite camp tee shirt were labeled "ripe" in the supermarket. I gradually learned, as everyone does, how dishonesty is woven into the way we use language. 

 More egregiously dishonest use of language for political purposes takes place in the first scene of act three of Julius Caesar which I'm reading now. Cassius says that by cutting life short we actually save ourselves years that we would have spent merely fearing death anyway. This is right after Caesar has been stabbed in public, and Brutus says 

Brutus Grant that, and then is death a benefit.
So are we Caesar’s friends, that have abridged
His time of fearing death. Stoop, Romans, stoop, 105 And let us bathe our hands in Caesar’s blood
Up to the elbows and besmear our swords.
Then walk we forth, even to the market place,
And waving our red weapons o’er our heads,
Let’s all cry ‘Peace, freedom and liberty 

I remember reading my mothers signature and noting the difference between the letters in her name and the letters distinguishable on my permission slip. 

I remember the neon sign at my family's business with the word Office spelled in one coil of green. In places the black paint had flaked off and office looked more like offuce. And I couldn't understand why milk wasn't just called milk, but 2%. I learned to despise the words with pulp stamped across the top of the orange juice carton, not because I disliked pulp, which I didn't, but because it was only cool to like pulp free orange juice among the girls at school. 

And the cars. Some of the first words I could recognize were the names of the cars we referred to by their make. Mom's sable, the family Taurus, Wesley's Mazda. Granny's grand marquis was an enigma with that final s. 

A huge part of learning language is the acceptance of truths we don't understand, or maybe the initial inculcation into the social conceit that we are honest and that things make sense.