I used to love to read Blyton books and vividly remember being bought 3 all at once and feeling myself very rich. Most of the time I had to trawl through the second hand shops (one I remember as the bus ride never stopped there, you had to cross a subway and walk down a street that was that little bit ‘seedy’). I still have many of them, mostly paperbacks. And of course when I started to write my first ‘book’ when I was eleven, still tucked away in my mother’s work, it was my Enid Blyton pastiche. Replete with my own parrot.
I tried reading one when I was 19 and I couldn’t get through a paragraph. It seemed banal, ludicrous, silly. And in all the hype about J K Rowling I eventually went to the library and picked up the first Harry Potter and read the first paragraph. Enid Blyton revisited. I hastily put it back on the shelf for the minds who adore those kinds of things, the little minds still seeking adventures in places I no longer look for them, real life.
There are adventures of course, and magical people and moments you will never forget and feelings that will make you feel more alive than you have before, but the mind has changed. You haven’t lost anything if you cannot read these books because they have become too simple, you have simply gained your own imagination.
Use it.