Books I Loathed discussion

Hurrah For Little Noddy
If you read the Noddy books as a child, it's a bit bizarre to contemplate...
Noddy must get a job so he can have a house, clothing and a car (Protestant work ethic, anyone?)
There are only a few 'toys of colour' - the ones I can recall are 'golliwogs' who love to steal cars!
Bobbsey Twins 62: The Bobbsey Twins and the Doodlebug Mystery
Then there are the Bobbseys... A white family that lives with their 'coloured' servants, Sam and Dinah...

If one really wants to look into it, C.S Lewis' The Horse and His Boy has a race of people that resemble very stereotyped Middle Easterners.

They are described as barbaric, backwards and worship demonic gods. They wage war against the "fair-skinned" Narnians to conquer their world.

The only thing that's missing is Aslan being chased by a bare-chested muscular Iranian wearing a turban and wielding a scimitar yelling "Hassan chop!" to make the image Lewis created complete.

I concur with Göbbels, though I find the "Caspian-retrieves an-empire book" (number 2 after the horse) even more deplorable in its obvious anglo-centric war mongering general atmosphere...

Susan Coolidge and Katy books :-D
I LOVED them when I was like 10, reread them time after time, and then I reread them some time ago, as an adult, and... yikes. Especially What Katy Did Next, and Katy visiting Europe... how all Europeans (except some exceptional Brits, who could almost pass as Americans) are stupid barbarians and how all USonians are ideal people.
But it was written in 1886, so I suppose one can expect some of that.

I adored The Secret Garden by Francis Hodgson Burnett and I still enjoy the book, but its depiction of the Indian servants...yeah, I'm tugging my collar right now.

I devoured the Bobbsey Twins mystery series as a child in the 1980s and it's only now that I realize that the "weird accent" (how I referred to it) that the black characters spoke in was not such a positive portrayal.

I remember having so much trouble understanding what they were saying because the older editions of those books (which my school library had) had Sam and Dinah speaking in dialect. I wonder if newer editions -- if those books are even still in print -- changed that?

Little House on the Prarie... Yikes. The white settlers' feeling of entitlement to the land combined the expression "the only good Indian is a dead Indian" is like a perpetual dark cloud hanging over the whole book.