Well I finished Castle... This was the first book in the Adventure series I read as a child. I had read (and loved) the Famous Five, and tried the Secret Seven, but at that age I found them (the Secret Seven) too childish and unexciting compared with the Famous Five. With Castle of Adventure, I rem...

I finished the Secret series, which I had not read as a kid. The last ones were OK, but the first two are the best, particularly the first one (The Secret Island). Then I read the first Naughtiest Girl book, a series which I also hadn't read as a kid. This is what I wrote in goodreads: I think this ...

The Famous Five audiobooks read by Jan Francis are very good. They are the book being read by a pleasant reader, which is exactly what I want, not a full cast dramatization. They are about 4 hours long, or a bit longer. If you see audiobooks that are much shorter than that, then you can assume they ...

I haven't watched this and I'm not really interested, even though I really enjoyed the books. I have very little faith in Hollywood's, and whatever the British equivalent is, ability to make period pieces nowadays without filling them with frustrating anachronisms.

According to The Guardian, members of the Enid Blyton Society were "spluttering into their ginger beer" when Nicolas Winding Refn, the director of cult violent films Pusher and Drive, was announced as one of the creators of the BBC’s new version of The Famous Five: https://www.theguardian....

Bertie wrote: ↑08 Dec 2023, 11:42 Two that really work, and that I always enjoy, are Valley and Circus of Adventure. I love those.

Agreed on Valley. An all time great, without a doubt. I'm not such a big fan of Circus, at least not at that level, although it's better than many of the other faraway adventures.

I'm reading the Secret series. Three books in now. Secret Island is great, among Blyton's very best. Spiggy Holes is quite good, although not very original, containing a lot of the usual plot elements. Secret Mountain is OK, although these Blyton adventures in faraway lands often come out a bit too ...

I didn't give a lot of thought to when they were set, but I kind of assumed they had been written some years ago (I was vaguely aware they had been around for years before I started reading them and that no new ones were being published), but I assumed they were kind of contemporary. I certainly was...

Courtenay wrote: ↑21 Nov 2023, 14:00 Those sound really interesting, Anita,

Agreed!

Personally, I think it's a shocking loss. I agree. When Enid Blyton enters the public domain, we'll be free of publishers and their censoring, and all the books will be available again, in the original form, but it will be 15 years before that happens in most of the world, although her work is alre...

     There is one important exception to this: Prince Paul. He does not appear at all in the first book of the Secret series, Interesting. I have not read the Secret series, except for book 1, which is really excellent. In fact I'm rereading it now, as preparation for reading the others in the seri...

However, Enid wasn't keen on writing war-based fiction by that stage. On 19th July 1943 she wrote in a letter to Macmillan: "...do you mind if I don't write a book bringing in the war? I say this for two reasons - one is that the war inevitably dates a book, and after the war is over few peopl...

I have no insight on what Enid Blyton's motivation for not mentioning the war was (maybe I should read a biography), but it looks like she wanted to make the books timeless and avoided references to real-world issues. Of course, now the books are dated by the lack of modern technology, but it's not ...

I never liked Pip. He always seemed a bit of a dick. Well, we don't see that much of him. Fatty always gets all the spotlight in those books, with Bets having her moments, but the others are not given that much to do other than being there. It's true that Pip is a bit short with his little sister, ...

when Ern ran away from his uncle, Fatty put him up in the shed - I wonder if he would have done that to Larry or Pip, or would have invited them into the house (without his parents' seeing). I think some of this distance can be attributed not so much to the children themselves, but to the social re...