I liked Enid Blyton, but it was the stories about kids surviving while stranded on an island, or exposing kidnappers or smugglers that really grabbed me. Not so much about the playing with dolls.
I had a huge thing for "kids on their own" stories, actually. Runaways, orphans, lost children... it was quite a theme in my reading.
Other things I remember liking a lot were the Jack McGurk mystery series (far more mischief-oriented than Encyclopedia Brown), Albert Payson Terhune's dog stories (tear-jerking!), and a series of talking animal political allegories by Ben Lucien Burman, called the Catfish Bend books (they're wonderful, but out of print).
One traumatic reading experience was sampling some of the New Hardy Boys novels, and Irma (can't recall if she was Frank or Joe's girlfriend) was killed by a car bomb. Talk about innocence lost!