Childhood Reading

Today is the birthday of Enid Blyton, born on this day in 1897 at 354 Lordship Lane, East Dulwich. I only mention this detail because long ago, in another life, I worked at the public library a few doors away from that far from illustrious address - a library where her works were at the time (this was in the days when Political Correctness was sweeping all before it) frowned upon and not displayed on the shelves of the children's library. Nor was the fact of her birthplace ever mentioned or marked in any way - she was, as far as that borough was concerned, a non-person. Not that any amount of disapproval or censorship did much then, or has done much since, to dent the phenomenal popularity of Enid Blyton among children. She seems to be one of those irresistible forces - irresistible only to children, thank heavens - in the face of which criticism is so much wasted breath. Think Jeffrey Archer, but on a vastly larger scale, over a far longer timespan, and with the saving grace that her readers are not adults. I read the odd Blyton myself in childhood and found them, as I dimly recall, very readable simply for their narrative drive - but I was not much of a reader. I'd pick up what might come my way - which wouldn't be much in a non-bookish household - but I didn't care much about books and really read very little, at least until books began to 'do it' for me, around the age of 10 - odd books that I would read again and again: a life of Albert Schweitzer, Black Beauty, Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals, Tom Sawyer, then, in a bit of a leap, the bombshell of discovering Tennyson (In Memoriam) and Dickens (A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist), and after that, a few more years along the line, finally getting the guidance I needed (thanks to a really good teacher), I truly became a reader...
It was Sophie King's comment under the Tove Jansson post below that got me thinking about childhood reading. She is so right about the joy of seeing another generation discovering the pleasures of reading - and still better if it's with the same books that we enjoyed ourselves in childhood. In my case, it was as often as not a case of discovering rather than rediscovering - I had never read the wonderful E. Nesbit, for example, until I (or, more usually, Mrs Nige, one of the keenest bedtime readers on the planet) read her to our children. Tove Jansson and most of Beatrix Potter, among much else, I hadn't read - let alone a whole world of superb children's books published since my own childhood. It seems to me that reading to our children is not only one of the greatest gifts we can give them - both in the act itself and in the worlds it potentially opens out - but it can also be a great gift to ourselves, and one of those rare occasions in the reading life when we are not on our own.