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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!