from Perry Nodelman's The Pleasures of Children's Literature, 2nd. Ed. New York: Longman, 1996. pp. 20-21.
The pleasure of words themselves -- the patterns their sounds can make, the interesting ways in which they combine with each other, their ability to express revealing, frightening, or beautiful pictures or ideas.
The pleasure of having our emotions evoked: laughing at a comic situation, being made to feel the pain or joy a character experiences.
The pleasure of making use of our repertoire of knowledge and our strategies of comprehension -- of experiencing our mastery
The pleasure of recognizing gaps in our repertoire and learning the information or the strategy we need to fill them, thereby developing further mastery.
The pleasure of pictures and ideas that the words of texts evoke -- the ways in which they allow us to visualize people and places we've never actually seen or think about ideas we haven't considered before.
The pleasure of story -- the organized patterns of emotional involvement and detachment, the delays of suspense, the climaxes and resolutions, the intricate patterns of chance and coincidence that make up a plot.
The pleasure of formula-- of repeating the comfortably familiar experience of kinds of stories we've enjoyed before.
The pleasure of newness -- of experiencing startlingly different kinds of stories and poems.
The pleasure of storytelling -- our consciousness of how a writer's point of view or emphasis of particular elements shapes our response.
The pleasure of structure -- our consciousness of how words, pictures, or events form meaningful patterns.
The pleasure of our awareness of the ways in which all the elements of a literary work seem to fit together to form a whole.
The pleasure of the ways in which texts sometimes undermine or even deny their own wholeness.
The pleasure of finding mirrors for ourselves -- of identifying with fictional characters
The pleasure of escape -- stepping outside of ourselves at least imaginatively and experiencing the lives and thoughts of different people.
The pleasure of understanding -- of seeing how literature not only mirrors life but comments on it and makes us consider the meaning of our own existence.
The pleasure of seeing through literature -- of realizing how poems or stories attempt to manipulate our emotions and influence our understanding and our moral judgments in ways we may or may not be prepared to accept.
The pleasure of recognizing forms and genres -- of seeing similarities between works of literature.
The pleasure of gaining insight into history and culture through literature.
The pleasure of discussing with others their responses to texts we have read.
The pleasure of developing a deeper understanding of our responses and of relating them to our responses to other texts and to our understanding of literature in general.