Simply put, better books make better people, but let me give you some thoughts on the subject from a few gifted thinkers and writers:

“We don’t want to feel less when we have finished a book; we want to feel that new possibilities of being have been opened to us. We don’t want to close a book with a sense that there is no light in the darkness; we want to feel that we have been given illumination”     Madeleine L’Engle

“In our epoch, when storytelling has become a forgotten art and has been replaced by amateurish sociology and hackneyed psychology, the child is still the independent reader who relies on nothing but his own taste. Names and authorities mean nothing to him. Long after literature for adults has gone to pieces, books for children will constitute the last vestige of storytelling, logic, faith in the family, in God, in real humanism.”   Isaac Bashevis Singer

Time and again when I read aloud to children from the great writers, they respond from somewhere deep within themselves, and it is always thrilling to observe this when it happens.  They know when they are hearing the truth, and they prefer to hear it.

Edith Hamilton wrote the following in the introduction to her book “Witness to the Truth“, and though it was written back in 1948, I believe it describes too accurately what has happened to our literature today:

“Pictures, poems, novels are esteemed in proportion as they show the ugliness and evil and wretchedness of human life. In all the great periods of art the artist looked at the world as the Creator did, and found it good. His aim was to make others share in that vision, to clarify for them the truth of beauty and the beauty of truth. When he had painted his picture or written his poem, people would see truth and beauty where they had not before.  His work was with what he thought of as outside himself, and was illuminated by his imagination.

With the arrival of Freud the outer world ceased to be important. Self-knowledge was the clue to truth; in the course of examining oneself and ascribing what one finds there to humanity in general, the idea of what Plato called “Beauty absolute, simple, and everlasting” has become obscured almost to the point of disappearing.

Is this the way the world is to go?  That depends on the people who are living in it.  Not only one way is open.  We have a choice.”

Our choice should be to reject bleak reading material, especially for children.  Childhood is a time for play, for wonder, for the birth of imagination and true creativity. In a place where children have so many material advantages, it is not right to stunt their spiritual growth, to plant fear where hope should flourish.   Children will experience sadness and pain enough on the road to adulthood, this project is about starting them off with some really good stories for the journey.