George's Marvellous Medicine

This book by Roald Dahl is a fucking shitshow, let's be honest. So there's a boy called George who lives a pretty happy life on a farm with his family, all of whom he gets along pretty well with, except his Grandma - who is never actually abusive, she can't really be as she's too disabled to leave her chair - but is sometimes a bit harsh to him. Which drives George, one day, when the rest of his family is out, to bungle together every single random chemical ingredient* he can find in the house, blend it up, and replace his Grandma's medicine with this new concoction. It does not go well. Grandma grows to be like forty feet tall or something. George's dad, when he gets back, isn't concerned for his mother-in-law's wellbeing - he's excited about the prospect of this new medicinal invention for farming methods. George tests the medicine on a chicken and a cow and they both also grow to ridiculous sizes. George's dad gets so excited that he starts trying to throw together a patent whereby he can somehow in the future control a farm of oversized livestock - but George runs out of medicine. And can't remember exactly how he made it in the first place. His dad is upset, but optimistic - and prompts George to try again, which the boy does: only for his new concoction to immediately cause Grandma to shrink so much that she literally cannot be seen by the human eye.

   The end. Dark, right? What, you wanted spoiler warnings? Roald Dahl is basically public domain at this point babe, don't come to a blog specifically about books and complain that a post like this spoiled it for you. Anyway. I would recommend this book as a bedtime story for children between threeish and sevenish, as it's incredibly dark and also funny as fuck.

* I will be frank, the chapter where he's deciding what to put into it is hilarious.

Matilda

This book by Roald Dahl is so much of a classic that I'm not even going to devote more than a single sentence to a summary of its plot - as I did with the other Dahl classics that I've read it the last few days. If any blog-followers are curious for this recent diversion in content, I am staying at my parents' house for Christmas and they have a Roald Dahl anthology, and I thought it might be funny to revisit some of my childhood stories for blogging purport. Anyway, if you need a fuller explication of the story of this one than I am offering here, go ask Danny Devito.

   Matilda is the neglected child of a neglectful family who takes her love for books to her impoverished teacher, Ms Honey; albeit under the stern gaze of abusive headmistress Mrs Trunchbull - but eventually discovers she has psychic powers, so she fucks everyone over and makes her own life go as well as she pretty much wants.

   Wow, yeh - that was only one sentence. And I thought it was going to become a bit overlong. But yeh, that's the plot. Like most Dahl stories, yes, this is very dark in places - there is violent and emotional abuse, with both Matilda and Ms Honey and a few other characters being the victims; but it's all okay in the end because little miss bookworm can move things with her mind so she gets to manipulate events to the desired outcome. The more I think about Roald Dahl stories as an adult the less I get what message he was really going for, you know?

The BFG

This book by Roald Dahl is one of the less-dark of most of most of his oeuvre, if I remember rightly, which is odd because it does actually feature (or at least mention) quite a lot of human people being eaten alive.

   Story in a nutshell: an insomniac orphan called Sophie is kidnapped by a giant with big ears and a trumpet, who takes her back to his homeland. Here he introduces himself as the BFG (Big Friendly Giant - even though, he is the least big of all the giants, and the only friendly one of all of them, so none of his nomenclature semantics are particularly helpful overall) and reveals, with much relief to Sophie, that unlike the other giants (who eat humans every night) he is strictly vegetarian - subsisting, it seems, on weird warty cucumber things and a particularly-odd strain of soda that makes you have orgasmic farts with every gulp. Sophie accepts this, and learns to trust the BFG further when he hides her from the other giants - who are in the habit of bullying him. Later on the BFG shows Sophie what he does for a job (why, it is never shown - goodness knows who pays him to do this if anyone); catching dreams in bottles and spitting them through his trumpet into the ears of sleeping humans. Sophie has a brainwave: "if we give the Queen a nightmare about giants coming and eating people, she'll do something about it!" Daft, I know. But this is what happens. This is Roald Dahl man, not... I dunno, Brian Catling. So the BFG takes Sophie to see the Queen of England, they have breakfast (which is a whole chapter, can you believe - not even Tolkien was ever THAT self-indulgent) and she agrees to set the military up to catch the giants next time they come to England to eat people. Surprise, it works, and the giants are captured and thrown into a pit. Basically the end.

   I saw a cartoon of this when I was like six, saw the more recent movie adaptation like four years ago, and I must have read the book (this time included) at least half a dozen times; and I still don't know why it's a popular story. This is pure silly. Your kid might like this. I do not. If I was your kid - I did not.

The Twits

This book by Roald Dahl is a grim, somewhat funny but mostly grim, story about domestic abuse taken to its most horrendous logical conclusion, in a flamboyantly misanthropic married couple who end up more or less killing each other with all their schemes and plots. I mean, the monkeys helped, but spoilers.

Rhyme Stew

This book is a masterful, short but jam-packed collection of poems by Roald Dahl, that most pre-eminent of Englishly encouraging kids' writers. Children and adults alike will find much of delightingly subcultural echo herein; it builds on a foundation that is folkloric and immaterial to look at - but which undergirds a heroic span of shared subconscious poetic or notherwise elements in the British-European consciousness.
   A marvellous key of a book to my own head's journey, the perfect soundtrack to my heartsong as I read it - Quentin Blake's illustrations are just the icing on the cake. Hilarious at times, heartbreakingly real or rawkily rude in others - this would probably be in my top seven or eight poetry books of all time that I've read, Full-Authorship Compendiums notwithstanding.