There is a select group of writers who are accessible to anyone, at whatever age or stage of life—Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac, Tolstoy—and then there are those whose significance is not properly revealed until a particular moment.
—Stefan Zweig
Maybe they can understand Ender’s Game at eleven, or maybe it won’t be until they’re seventeen. Maybe they can get the message of The Great Gatsby in high school, or maybe it’s something you’ll have to read as a kind of family book club later on. Maybe they’ll take to poetry early, or maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll love The Little Prince or Charlotte’s Web as much as you did, or maybe tonight is just not the night.
Stefan Zweig was twenty when he first picked up Michel de Montaigne’s Essays—an incomparable book—but he had “little idea what to do with it.” It wasn’t until the last year of his life, after two world wars and a forced exile, that Zweig picked up Montaigne again. This time, the connection was instant. The impact was enormous. Because the moment was right.
Remember, our goal here is to raise readers. But as with gardening, there is a time and a season for certain things to take root, and until you get there, the thing you’ll need most is patience.