Picture from Flickr, by Ian Wilson

"Put. It. Down. Just because you choose to purchase the adult cover version of a child’s book doesn’t defer from the fact that it is still meant for people much younger than you.

You won’t look any less moronic, and it won’t get you down to the level of your seven-year-old self. It won’t make you any more well-read or intellectual, and it definitely won’t help you chat up girls. Maybe it’s time you put down that book about wizards and read something more appropriate to a person your age."

With a consistent surge of adult’s fiction hitting the bookshelves, why is it that many adults are rejecting their age group and picking books to suit their shoe size? Why are books such as ‘Northern Lights’ by Phillip Pullman, and the Harry Potter series becoming the read of choice for many adults?

Are adults bored of the recurrent themes of sexual politics, power relationships and ego masturbation in the literature written for them? Literature concocted with children in mind often appeals to the child that kicks around inside the hardened exterior of a ‘grown-up’.

That mysticism that often escapes the realm of adulthood, save a few exceptions, offers an opportunity of escapism for the one who has become lost in the not-so-real world of cyberspace and technology.

Gone are the modern interpretations of ‘advanced’ equipment, substituted by devices such as Pullmans’ ‘Altheiometer’, which appeals to the part of the human character that left when puberty barged its way in.

Have we grown up and forgotten about these other-worldly experiences or are we just too old for it? Are you one of those that snubs the reader that chooses Rowling over Rushdie?

I admit; before writing this column I was one of those who was reluctant to re-discover the area of literature that I was all too willing to leave behind with childhood. I will never like Harry Potter, but I can appreciate its appeal.

I found ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time’ by Mark Haddon to be an exceptionally touching insight into the mind of its young protagonist and others suffering with Aspergers Syndrome. By saying that the books themselves are less well written than their adult-fiction peers is absurd.

I can think of a whole host of popular, contemporary fiction featured in televised ‘book clubs’ that should not, to put it bluntly, exist.

I have found that I have, essentially, gone backwards with books I have read as an adult that were meant to inspire the cavernous mind of a child.

It is hard to erase the analytical side of me that stops me from getting as lost in the stories as I would have at a younger age, but I realise that the need to ask questions stems from the place these tales of fantasy, intrigue and often pure nonsense are trying to coax.

Children's books ask more questions, and give less ordinary, less obvious answers, if there are any at all.

I will never be able to talk to a seven-year-old about the same book, even if it was originally ‘designated’ to them, without an erratic fear of accidental corruption, as each page in my volume seems to tell a completely different story to the one that they are reading.

To my eyes, ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ by Swift tells a story of madness, political power struggles and Marxist-feminist connotations.

To a child it merely talks about adventures with abnormally little people, giants and talking horses. Maybe in the future that child will grow up and realise what I have realised, or maybe something that I never thought I could drag out of it. Maybe that’s it.

Maybe we need that difference of opinion between adult and child, literature or not.

"In our time, when the literature for adults is deteriorating, good books for children are the only hope, the only refuge." ~Isaac Bashevis Singer