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I’m sure you’ll be pleased to hear that this is the last in my Roald Dahl binge, and after this I’ll be going back to books that take a little longer to read!

For this book, I’d not read it but I had seen the film – classic

Matilda is a supernaturally bright little girl, who has parents who literally couldn’t care less about her. I’m honestly surprised they fed her sometimes. When she starts school she has a teacher (Miss Honey) who appreciates and values her, but a headteacher (Mrs Trunchbull) who is scarier than most children’s book baddies.

A theme that runs through most of Roald Dahl’s books which is even more prevalent here is that it’s ok to take revenge on someone (normally an adult) if they are mean and horrible. Matilda finds ways to take revenge on her parents, and also the Trunchbull, and there’s nothing wrong with anything she does!

Some of my favourite one-liners:

• “There are many things that make a man irritable when he arrives home from work in the evening and a sensible wife will usually notice the storm-signals and will leave him alone until he simmers down.”
• “If it’s by an American it’s certain to be filth. That’s all they write about.”
• “I’m afraid men are not always quite as clever as they think they are. You will learn that when you get a bit older, my girl.”
• “I think Mr C. S. Lewis is a very good writer. But he has one failing. There are no funny bits in his books.”
• “I cannot for the life of me see why children have to take so long to grow up. I think they do it on purpose.”
• “My idea of a perfect school, Miss Honey, is one that has no children in it at all.”
• “Margarine, Matilda thought. She really must be poor.”

In the film Matilda’s “powers” come to light quite early on, and she has all sorts of adventure with them. With her parents, at the Trunchbull’s house, all-sorts. But in the book that’s just one short section at the end. In a way I preferred it that way though; a simpler story but makes the chalkboard stuff way more effective and impressive.

Another one that I had actually no clue what it was about! The funny thing is, I’m fairly obsessed with giraffes but have never even associated that obsession with this book!

It’s only about 70 pages, so I read it in one sitting. Billy notices the old sweet shop has been bought out by a window cleaning company, which just so happens to be run by a giraffe, a pelican (so *that’s* what a Pelly is!) and a monkey (he sings a song about them which includes the title of the book, so he is “me”). They get a job cleaning the windows of the Duke of Hampshire’s rather large house…. any more and I’d be giving the main drama away as it’s so short, so I’ll just leave you with the rather charming ending:

We have tears in our eyes
As we wave our goodbyes,
We so loved being with you, we three.
So do please now and then
Come and see us again,
The Giraffe and the Pelly and me.

All you do is to look
At a page in this book
Because that’s where we always will be.
No book ever ends
When it’s full of your friends
The Giraffe and the Pelly and me.

I really wasn’t looking forward to reading this book – as a child I vaguely remember watching the film and pretty fairly terrified, but it’s part of the list so had to be read!

It wasn’t too bad in the end. The tale of a little boy who’s Grandmamma teaches him about witches and what to look out for, so when they accidentally come across their annual convention, they hatch a plan to get revenge for all the children those witches have destroyed. Because witches hate children!

The good news is that Dahl gives us the things to look for to spot witches, so we can be on our guard!

• A REAL WITCH is certain always to be wearing gloves when you meet her… because she doesn’t have finger-nails. Instead of finger-nails she has thin curvy claws, like a cat, and she wears the gloves to hide them.
• A REAL WITCH is always bald… A REAL WITCH always wears a wig to hide her baldness.
• Witches have slightly larger nose-holes than ordinary people… A REAL WITCH has the most amazing powers of smell.
• The eyes of a REAL WITCH are different from yours and mine. Look in the middle of each eye where there is normally a little black dot. If she is a witch the black dot will keep changing colour, and you will see fire and you will see ice dancing right in the very centre of the coloured dot.
• Witches never have toes… The feet have square ends with no toes on them at all.
• Their spit is blue.

And here are some of my favourite lines from the book.

• “In fairy-tales, witches always wear silly black hats and black cloaks, and they ride on broomsticks. But this is not a fairy-tale. This is about REAL WITCHES.”
• “I am not, of course, tellng you for one second that your teacher actually is a witch. All I am saying is that she might be one.”
• “You can’t go round pulling at the hair of every lady you meet, even if she is wearing loves. Just you try it and see what happens.”
• “Children should never have baths, it’s a dangerous habit.”
• “It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like so long as somebody loves you.”

Another very short one! after this they get a bit longer again so I won’t be spamming my blog so much!

I read this one quite a bit as a kid as we got a free copy with our teabags or cereal or something like that, but all I could really remember was the lists and lists of things that went into the concoction – I didn’t really remember the plot at all.

George is creating a medicine to feed to his horrible Grandma. Roald Dahl really does write awful people well, people that you don’t even feel bad about hating because there’s not an ounce of good in them! The medicine is filled with all he can find in the bathroom, his mum’s dressing table, the laundry room, the shed and the garage (but absolutely nothing from the medicine cabinet – because *that* would be considered going too far!).

The first batch does amazing things, but trying to reproduce it, each batch does slightly different things as they test them on their farm animals.

Utterly ridiculous but still fun. At least the book opens with a warning to children not to try this at home!

This is one of my least favourite books by Roald Dahl. That doesn’t mean I don’t like it! Just not as much as the rest.

I’ve realised in the last couple of books particularly that Dahl uses a lot of Americanisms. “Sneakers” for trainers, “pants” for trousers, and the like, very peculiar.

The book is about a couple, Mr & Mrs Twit, who really, really, *really* hate each other. The first half of the book is just them trying to one-up each other’s pranks and get revenge on each other! Granted, some of these are very clever. Particularly Mr Twit adding tiny discs of wood to the bottom of Mrs Twit’s walking stick and chair legs each night so she gradually thinks she’s shrinking 🙂

The second half improves though, when the monkey’s they keep in a cage in the garden form a plan to sort Mr and Mrs Twit out once and for all!

My favourite bit of the book, however, comes right near the beginning when we’re introduced to Mr & Mrs Twit.

“If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until it gets so ugly you can hardly bear to look at it.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”

Vile as it is, there’s a lot in it that’s very clever 🙂

A few years ago I started reading Roald Dahl’s books in publication order, alternating them between my “proper reading”, but somehow they started to fall by the wayside.

This year would have been Dahl’s 100th birthday, and my friend told me about a reading challenge she’s doing – to read all his children’s books before his birthday, 13th September. She was telling me how she was reading this book the same week that I read the tweet below, so when I discovered that it was also the next of his books I was due to read, I realised it was time to start up the series again!

https://twitter.com/matthaig1/status/752253347495895041

It’s a beautiful story of Danny and his dad, rekindling his dad’s former hobby of poaching. Sounds simple enough, but their relationship is lovely, and it still contains a whole load of Dahl’s wackiness – how did he even think of sewing up raisins with a needle and thread?!

I’d never read this book, I didn’t have a clue where the story was going, and yet still loved it. It’s very much the good guys vs the bad guys, and as a children’s book obviously the good will win out, that’s hardly a spoiler, but the story as it goes remains nicely unpredictable.

The other slightly weird thing that happens is that Danny’s dad tells Danny the story of the BFG one evening. I’ve never read that one either, but it’s a bit further down my list (which means he hadn’t written the full book yet when he woke this one) so I’ll have to wait – maybe the DVD of the new film will be out by then!

Enjoy!