Today's children need literature they can relate to

Pupils of Thika Road Primary School during the 17th Edition of Nairobi International Book Fair in September 2014. [ PHOTOS: JONAH ONYANGO]

NAIROBI: There was a time I used to drink all day, a Scotch every hour, starting at nine am,” the great writer J.G. Ballard once said. “Postponing that first drink until six in the evening was an epic battle. It was like the Battle of Stalingrad.”

Today, many Kenyan children are faced with not a drinking problem — although that one, also, in some quarters — but an epic thinking problem when it comes to issues of deciphering literature.