Love and hate, that's pretty strong words. I don't think I have feelings that strong about things very often, especially hate. Why would I hate a book? So let's go with „a book that you used to like a lot and that you don't like any more“. Enid Blyton's „The Mountain of Adventure“ (Der Berg der Abenteuer). I loved pretty much everything by Enid Blyton as a kid. My sister and I would always get her books in the local library and then she would read them to me. I don't remember reading many of them myself. My favourite series by her was the „adventure series“. They were about four kids: Jack, a bird lover with a talking parrot, his shy and always scared sister Lucy, Philip, who can talk to animals, and Dina, his bitchy sister. Together they solve different crimes. As a kid I perceived the books as thrilling and funny. A couple of years back my sister and I decided to read one of the books to each other during our vacation in Wales, which we did, and we were both kind of disappointed: the story made no sense, it wasn't thrilling at all and, worst of all, the book was so full of gender stereotypes! I think we have to cut the author some slack as the book was first published in 1949, but if you then look at „Das Doppelte Lottchen“ by Erich Kästner, which was published in exactly the same year and in which the female characters are portrayed in a much better way, in my eyes, you can see, that the year is not the only excuse. You might say now that the only reason we thought it was boring was, because it's a childrens book and we are grown up, but I have to disagree. I re-read a lot of childrens books and still enjoyed them.
However, Blyton's response to bad reviews is said to have been „I'm not interested in the views of critics over the age of 12“. Any maybe she was right about that. The books were written for kids and even though now I think it's full of wrong stereotypes, it obviously didn't make me become a dependent, shy and passive woman.
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