H elping his mother with a recent move, Bruce Handy came across a paper he’d written as a high-school senior. The subject was Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and at the end of the paper—to the question “What did you learn writing this paper?”— Handy wrote, “I learned that I would rather have read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” Already he was the smart aleck who would cut his teeth at Spy magazine. But more than that, his answer was prophetic, for Handy is now bringing out his first book, Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult (Simon & Schuster). It’s nothing less than a Golden Ticket into the Whipple-Scrumptious world of children’s classics, where mystical and marvelous surprises await.

Handy (a contributing editor at Vanity Fair) has ranged elegantly among subjects high and low, silly and serious. In Wild Things, returning to the books he read as a boy and to the books he discovered while reading to his children, Handy finds himself in a heightened realm of response—intellectual, conspiratorial, comic, quizzical, charmed, heartbroken, thunderstruck. To what is he responding? Handy starts with Goodnight Moon, ends with Charlotte’s Web, and in between explores Beatrix Potter’s principled anthropomorphism, Sendak and the fairy tale, Seuss’s anarchy, C. S. Lewis and God, and the revelation that is Laura Ingalls Wilder. “These are works of art,” Handy says, “and as with great works of art they bear scrutiny. The older you get the more you see.” Literary criticism through the prism of memoir, Wild Things is a read—a ride!—of pure pleasure.

—laura jacobs ILLUSTRATION BY ROSS MacDONALD