I read those books several times as a kid. In a pre-overly- technological society, those books are a sort of SciFi for kids, I was utterly fascinated by the contraptions and machinery employed by the little people. Particularly the car that ran on soda water and used syrup for lubricating, with a useful tap where you could get a glass of mixture to drink.
By contrast, I visited the bookstore kids section a few times but seems inundated with dull, modern stories. Worse yet, I find such books on the obligatory reading list in school, there were such lists when I was a kid too but almost never read those because they suck. School is the worst selector of good literature.
I've seen some Spanish books from Spain written from Youtubers and the quality compared to what I've got in late 80's and 90's it's abhorrent.
Even a cheap $3/3 EUR 'escape-room' book based on puzzles to solve it's far better than the average book today. Bigass fonts, dull content, near no mistery or troubles to solve.
I would include then books such as the "Dunno" series (Neznayka in Russian) from Nikolai Nosov: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunno
I read those books several times as a kid. In a pre-overly- technological society, those books are a sort of SciFi for kids, I was utterly fascinated by the contraptions and machinery employed by the little people. Particularly the car that ran on soda water and used syrup for lubricating, with a useful tap where you could get a glass of mixture to drink.
By contrast, I visited the bookstore kids section a few times but seems inundated with dull, modern stories. Worse yet, I find such books on the obligatory reading list in school, there were such lists when I was a kid too but almost never read those because they suck. School is the worst selector of good literature.