The children's classics adults should reread

We file them under children's books and assume we're done with them. But the great children's classics reward the adult reader with everything the child missed.

J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan is, underneath the fairy dust, a melancholy meditation on the refusal to grow up and everything that refusal costs. Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is a logician's playground, its nonsense hiding real puzzles about language and identity. L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz reads, to grown-up eyes, like a sly American fable about humbug and self-reliance.

Even the pure adventures deepen with age. Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island gave us Long John Silver, one of literature's most charming and dangerous villains, morally slippery in a way children thrill to and adults recognize. And Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince was, of course, always a book for adults wearing a child's coat.

Rereading them isn't nostalgia. It's discovering that the authors were writing over the child's head, to the person that child would become.