The Henry Sugar anthology is an odd one to consume in the middle of a Roald Dahl binge, but it’s always been one of my favorites.
Caroline Framke 8) The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More (1977) As with all of Dahl’s best works, Revolting Rhymes is incredibly strange and even disturbing, but often a whole lot of fun. Still: Dahl takes fairy tales to another level in Revolting Rhymes, creating a bloodbath out of Cinderella’s romance, making Little Red Riding Hood a stone-cold killer, and saddling Snow White with seven gambling-addict dwarfs. This makes sense, since Dahl’s stories already borrow so much from fairy-tale tropes almost all of his children’s stories involve neglected kids, villainous hags, and/or impossibly magical creatures. But the author’s singsong retellings of six famous fairy tales - with all the grotesque details Disney left out - provide an apt showcase for his twisted sense of humor. What was Dahl thinking? - Aja Romano 9) Revolting Rhymes (1982)Ī collection of rhyming poems, Revolting Rhymes isn’t a "typical" Dahl book. By the time the Vermicious Knids come along, you’re rooting for the aliens to win and wishing Charlie were still mooning by the chocolate river. Charlie’s two loving grandmothers from the previous book are abruptly transformed at the beginning of this one into unbearable, demonized examples of every shallow human trait Dahl can think to burden them with.
Moving the action as far away from Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory as possible, Dahl puts his heroes, Charlie Bucket and Willy Wonka, in a great glass elevator for what amounts to an epic road (space) trip with Charlie’s whole family, complete with all the long-suffering "are we there yet?" moments such a description implies.īut Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator also contains scathing, largely clichéd diatribes against US politics, including a weirdly infantilized look at the US president. Speaking of bitterness, there was no shortage of it on display in the sequel to Dahl’s most famous and most-beloved book. Constance Grady 10) Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (1972) Add to that the sheer bitterness of the premise, and you have one of Dahl’s most uneven works. Yeah, that solving-world-hunger angle comes out of nowhere at the end, as does the rest of the story’s not-exactly-resolution. Which, George’s father proclaims, means George has effectively solved world hunger! It makes her grow, becoming unimaginably large. Gleefully he mixes together curry powder and shampoo and antifreeze and other substances he finds lying around the house - but when he feeds it to his grandmother, it doesn’t have quite the effect he had in mind. So George decides to shake her up he makes her a dose of medicine. She forces her 8-year-old grandson to make her endless cups of tea and eat cabbage riddled with bugs.
#Most famous books free
Bonus, you can find free ebook copies of The Man in the Brown Suit, The Secret Adversary and The Secret of Chimneys because they're old enough for them to be in the public domain now.George’s grandmother has a puckered mouth and teeth stained pale brown. These ones are wildly implausible bordering on fantastical but they're so FUN! Plucky characters, escapist fiction- these are some I've read and re-read the most. Or check out a Tommy and Tuppence with The Secret Adversary. You could also branch into some of the stand alone or adventure types like The Man in the Brown Suit, They Came to Baghdad or The Secret of Chimneys. A Murder Is Announced is one of my favorite Miss Marple mysteries. Her first is Murder at the Vicarage, which I do love because the vicar is the narrator and he's quite funny. If you want to stay with him, a few suggestions of mine would be After the Funeral (very quintessential family/manor house mystery set in the fall), Halloween Party (kinda creepy but interesting) or The Hollow - moody, not Poirot heavy but I love the characters (not a popular choice for reasons I don't understand btw). So far, it looks like you've only read Poirot.