Now that she has read a Camus novel, my daughter is aware of Existentialism and might be able to sum it up better than I can. Adults over a certain age will remember the colour-coordinated nature of Penguin publications back then: black spines for Classics (Plato, Homer, Boccaccio, Tolstoy), orange for Fiction (slightly different shades for 19th century and 20th century novels), green for Crime, and an indeterminate light turquoise for Penguin Modern Classics. It was the same copy that I had read as a teenager, a “Penguin Modern Classic”. Yesterday she finished “The Outsider” by Albert Camus. My daughter, now aged 15, has progressed from “The Silver Sword”, through plenty of Young Adult Fiction, and is now reading books that you will find on the shelves marked Fiction, Literature or Modern Classics at your local bookshop. I do not throw away books, even the ones that I am unlikely to work my way through. The ones that I have not read are generally kept separate from those that I have. But in those intervening decades I had acquired thousands of books not aimed at children, and have read most of them. I finally read it too, after many decades of ignoring it. I wrote about the last of these back in 2016. But most of them I never even opened: whole sets of Paddington and Dr Doolittle books, the always-daunting “Swallows and Amazons” (so many pages), Ian Serraillier’s “The Silver Sword”. I even managed to read a few of them: “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” and the other six books now described as “The Chronicles” of Narnia”, “Emil and the Detectives” by Erich Kästner, “Castaway Christmas” by Margaret J Baker. Most of the books we had were published by Ladybird or Puffin. When I was growing up, we had a medium-sized bookcase filled with children’s books but only a handful of novels aimed at adults.

Castaway Christmas by Margaret J. Baker