I mentioned Sarah Bakewell in my post of March 29th, for two reviews of her new book on the history and meaning of humanism, Humanly Possible, a very long book on one of my primary interests, but so long that I haven’t decided yet whether to buy it or read it.
In the Sunday New York Times Book Review published on April 2nd — which I didn’t catch up on until several days after returning from the wedding trip to LA that weekend — published its weekly “By the Book” interview column with one about Sarah Bakewell. And it includes this passage.
What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?
As a child I read books manically, greedily and repeatedly, and loved anything with an animal in it. My two favorite series were Willard Price’s gung-ho stories about two brothers collecting wild creatures for their father’s zoo, and the “Adventure” series by Enid Blyton, which sent four children and a parrot into dangerous situations up a river, out to sea, inside a hollow mountain and away with a traveling circus.
I’ve mentioned at least a couple times on my series of blogs over the past 20+ years that Enid Blyton’s “Adventure” series were my own favorite series of books as a child; I first wrote about them here in 2005, and wrote a bit more about a couple of those books in 2016 here.
Coincidentally to this Sarah Bakewell interview, I am reading, as I do roughly once a decade, through the eight “Adventure” novels again. Today, I’m part-way through the 6th of the 8.
I don’t seem to have done a more comprehensive remembrance of those books, or detailed summaries/reviews, so perhaps I will do so after I finish this current reread.
Blyton’s books — likely all of the several hundred (mostly children’s) books she wrote, of which the eight “Adventure” books seem to be the most YA and least children’s — have for decades suffered the problems recently identified with Dr. Seuss and Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming. That is, they exhibit unexamined assumptions and prejudices about non-white races common 50 or 70 or 80 years ago that can be awkward or embarrassing, or at worst offensive for the delicately inclined, by modern standards. Blyton’s world was rural England in the 1940s and ’50s after the War; lingering Nazis and other threats from foreigners were everywhere. To the extent that the children of these novels encounter children from other countries (as I wrote in my notes when I last read these books a decade ago) “foreign children are disagreeable and spoiled, not as tough as British children.” Well, Americans these days think the same about foreigners, especially immigrants, that they are somehow inferior, disagreeable, dirty people; this exhibits the tribal motivations that lie deep within human nature. And I have no doubt other cultures around the world have similar prejudices about other peoples, especially their neighbors. (As the world becomes increasingly globalized, has this prejudice declined? Maybe a bit.)
There are dozens of Enid Blyton websites out there, which are a tribute to her enduring popularity. I’ve been looking at this one, The Enid Blyton Society, for references and descriptions to all her novels. The photo of Blyton on that site is shown at the top of this post.
