Parenting & Family Quote by Mark Haddon

Haddon draws a quiet but pointed line between two kinds of reading pleasure: the tidy satisfactions of being entertained and the riskier, more intimate act of being changed. The “rainy Sunday afternoon” is doing heavy cultural work here. It’s cozy, domestic, almost medicinal - a book as weather-proofing, as time-killer, as a perfectly acceptable adult indulgence. “Spellbound” flatters that impulse without mocking it; there’s no puritan scolding about escapism. But the sentence pivots on “unlike most children,” and that’s the provocation: maturity isn’t just longer attention spans or better taste, it’s an awareness that books can function as a kind of self-interrogation.

The second category is where Haddon’s intent sharpens. “Put them in touch” frames reading as contact, not consumption, and “a part of themselves they didn’t even know existed” suggests discovery with a hint of disorientation. Adults, he implies, carry more locked rooms. They’ve built a self-image sturdy enough to live in, which is exactly why the right novel can feel like it’s knocking through a wall rather than opening a door. Children, by contrast, are still assembling the house; revelation is their baseline.

Contextually, it tracks with Haddon's fiction, which often uses accessible storytelling to smuggle in harder questions about perception, empathy, and how thin the membrane is between “normal” life and the private logic beneath it. The subtext isn’t that adults read better. It’s that adults read defensively, and the best books aren’t just immersive - they’re invasive, in the best way.