Enid Blyton animations

There was a time when the world's ills could be effortlessly improved. Midnight feasts, lashings of ginger beer, a friendly policeman, friends always calling, good guys always winning. In the years since Enid Blyton's audience have grown up and discovered a harder world than she predicted, Blyton's own persona has taken a battering.

She has been vilified as a racist, a sexist, as anti-child and an uncaring mother. Her books have aged badly, changing from vital teen adventures to archaic texts offering glimpses of an England that is gone forever. Jacqueline Wilson and JK Rowling have stolen her audience and her books are now sold only to parents who desperately need their kids to embrace their parent's idyllic childhoods. This seemed to remain the scenario this Christmas as copies of The Magic Wishing Chair and the Mallory Towers series proved difficult to locate. But time has a curious way of catching up on us and just like Agatha Christie last year, it appears that Enid Blyton could be due for a resurgence of sorts. Adults polled in December listed The Famous Five as first and The Faraway Tree as third on a list of books they favour for their children. The rest of the Top 5 was made up of works recently reinvigorated by cinema; CS Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia at 2, Tolkein's Hobbit at 4 and Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at 5. Can Blyton undergo similar re-animation? Can the adventures of Julian, Dick, Anne and George (boys first, please) have any attraction to children recently dazzled by the more frenetic adventures of Spy Kids or The Incredibles? Book Notes reckons that Blyton's future popularity will come from her books aimed at younger kids. TV and film executives must be looking to The Enchanted Forest as a possibility to recreate huge recent successes. If not, it may be that the future of Blyton lies with the adults who read her in the last millennium.

Book Notes has got to 'fess up; writing a news column in the dying embers of a year is like tailoring a new suit for the Emperor – there's never any material. The big cat publishers are on restorative breaks, trying to figure out which half-baked celebrity might have a life story worth telling. This time last year, some low level executive was telling their boss that the world was sick to death of the Osbournes and their 24 hour a day televised lives. By year end, you'd proved this grunt wildly wrong and made Sharon Osborne's Extreme: My Autobiography the sensation of the season, almost an end of term prize for her surviving a dead end family and that awful X Factor show. It has proven, as did Being Jordan in 2004, that achievement and talent is no longer a prerequisite for an autobiography's subject. The booksellers are celebrating another viciously competitive year which saw the big books like Jamie Oliver's Jamie's Italy and Lynne Truss' Talk to the Hand sold at 50 per cent of the recommended cover price. No one's interrupted the Christmas cheer yet, but pretty soon someone will nod guiltily to the storeroom full of books that didn't sell in last year's sale. Within a week they'll be sitting beside all the left over copies of Schott's Almanac and Is it Just Me or Is Everything Shit for your New Year's sale delectation. We need to tell the bookstores that unlike puppies, novelty books and annuals ARE just for Christmas.

You the readers are trying to work out why your brother bought you The Dan Brown Box set collection while reading in the Sunday papers that famous people get better books. It may help you to know that these are aspirational lists – books they'd hoped to read in 2006 rather than books on which they'd actually broken spines. For next year, our fervent wish is they'll ask Bertie and Co what books they'd read when they knew they should have been concentrating on the Lemass biography. As for your humble columnist, he's left to rifle through dispiriting press releases and half-assed internet reports on your behalf. Are you really going to be interested in the OCA report on British schools showing that modern teenagers 'lack reading stamina'? Did it really take a university study to work out that our kids would sustain fewer injuries if they spent their days indoors reading Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince? Honestly, the best we came up with is that a Devon Council is to encourage reading by leaving 15,000 copies of Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days in the county's Chinese takeaways. Unless someone dies, nothing happens in the holidays. Take it from us, the year-end is no place for those needing stimulation. So, like Book Notes, throw the feet up and wait for it all to start again in 2006. January welcomes Ian McEwan's Saturday in paperback, Stephen King's Cell, the new James Patterson and our own late Christmas present, Jay McInerney's The Good Life. Needless to say, we hope it also welcomes some newsworthy subjects in 2006.