Old favourites still appeal to readers
When looking at our newly purchased children’s books recently I noticed a number of titles that I remembered reading as a young girl, which was a number of decades ago, that are still being published and enjoyed by children today.
It won’t be a surprise to readers that one of these authors is the well-loved Enid Blyton. Born in 1897, Enid became the seventh-best-selling fiction author of all time behind William Shakespeare, Agatha Christine and other household names. Behind Enid Blyton, according to Wikipedia, is J. K. Rowling and Dr Seuss. She was also the most prolific writer, having published 800 titles. The most famous stories fit within the series of The Famous Five and The Secret Seven, however the title I remember most fondly was The naughtiest girl in the school, originally written in the 1940s and 1950s but still appealed to me 30 years later.
Around the time I also enjoyed the Milly Molly Mandy books by Joyce Lankester Brisley which my mother told me she had also enjoyed as a girl. I was drawn to the shortening on Milly Molly Mandy’s rather long name from the even longer Millicent Margaret Amanda and the maps inside the covers of each book which fuelled a passion for maps and adventures to this day.
At intermediate school I devoured the complete Willard Price Adventure series in which brothers Hal and Roger Hunt travel the globe searching for and capturing wild animals for zoos, circuses and aquariums. These books were originally called Adventure Stories for Boys so I was perhaps being a bit rebellious ignoring the suggestion that these were boys’ books. I am about to reread Elephant Adventure and expect to be horrified by the efforts to track down and capture a rare great white elephant, given that as an adult I have visited both Africa and Asia to see elephants in their natural environments or rescued from the kinds of worlds that were deemed good for wild animals when these children’s books were written.
Another series of books ‘for boys’ that is still being published today is the Biggles series by W. E. Johns.
Detective stories have always been popular with young readers and on our shelves today you will find a number of books in which mysteries were solved by The Hardy Boys, Trixie Belden and Nancy Drew.
Our challenge for parents and grandparents this week is to pick up one of these stories that you enjoyed when you were younger and read it again perhaps with one of your children or grandchildren. Let us know what you think of that series.