Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a 1964 children's novel by British author Roald Dahl. The story features the adventures of young Charlie Bucket inside the chocolate factory of eccentric chocolatier Willy Wonka. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was first published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. in 1964 and in the United Kingdom by George Allen & Unwin 11 months later. In the 2012 survey published by SLJ, a monthly with primarily US audience, Charlie was the second of four books by Dahl among their Top 100 Chapter Books, one more than any other writer. Time magazine in the US included the novel in its list of the 100 Best Young-Adult Books of All Time.
Stats for nerds
4recommend
33mentions
30people
2008–2026years
12% recommend85% neutral3% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- (other readers: sorry, I know this post is going to be a bit obnoxiously long, but I didn't want to put it on a pastebin or some other external service and potentially have it disappear if someone wanted to reference it in the future. If you're not interested please feel free to collapse this!)
I actually asked my mom to compile a list of books she could remember, because a friend had kids and was getting to the age where they were starting to read too. Here's what she came up with (note, no particular order of difficulty or maturity here):
My Father’s dragon series
Where the sidewalk ends, Shel Silverstein
A pizza the size of the Sun
Choose your own adventure books
The Great Brain
The Boxcar Children series
Captain Underpants
Roald Dahl books: The BFG, James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, The Twits, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory/The Great Glass Elevator (not as good)
My Side of the Mountain
No More Dead Dogs
The Secret Garden
Bridge to Terabithia (Deals with death, a little older)
The Lion, the witch, and the wardrobe
Across five Aprils (civil war historical fiction, older)
The Broken Blade (Voyageur) & Sequel
Island of the blue dolphins
The witch of blackbird pond
Johnny Tremaine (a bit older)
The sign of the Beaver
Charlotte’s Web
Because of Winn Dixie
Tuck Everlasting (sad at end)
Ruby Holler
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Treasure Island
The Pushcart War
Maniac Magee
Rascal
Frindle
Hatchet (Gary Paulsen)
Mr. Popper’s Penguins (young)
Tales of a 4th Grade Nothing (Juy Blume)
Pippi Longstocking
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle (young)
A Wrinkle in Time
Moccasin Trail
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
From the Mixed Up files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
The Egypt Game
The Phantom Tollbooth (young)
Holes (little older)
Sideways Stories from Wayside School (young)
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Homer Price (easy reading)
The Indian in the Cupboard
Misty of Chincoteague (series)
Aesop’s Fables (young)
The Eye, the Ear, and the Arm
Redwall series
Watership Down
(I'll throw in the Discworld series too for kids that are getting a bit older! It's probably very readable for, say, an advanced 5th grader. I was tearing through all the redwall books and the Golden Compass series at that point and Discworld is probably comparable. Golden Compass wasn't finished then and The Amber Spyglass ended up being kind of a disappointment. I know I was reading Discworld by 7th grade for sure.)
- Haha, yeah, I can understand that.
The good news is that the early reader books tend to be very short - 15-30 pages of very large type, and lots of illustrations. < 5000 words, and many < 1000 words.
I don't know a ton of them because I personally sort of skipped straight from picture books to middle grade books. The one series I can remember is called "Frog and Toad". If you have access to a library (physical or digital) with English language titles, you may be able to find more under the "Early Reader" classification.
Middle grade fiction can really be fun for an adult. There are tons of options depending on what sort of stories you like. A few ideas and favorites:
- The Goosebumps series is popular.
- There are a lot of middle grade mystery series like the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew
- A few of my personal favorites from childhood: The Pushcart War; Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH; A Wrinkle in Time; The Phantom Tollbooth; the Chronicles of Narnia (warning: heavy Christian symbolism); Bunnicula; Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle; Mr. Popper's Penguins; Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; anything by Roald Dahl
- Some "classics" can be considered middle grade (warning: some of these reflect racist and colonialist 19th and early 20thC patterns of thought): Robinson Crusoe; Peter Pan; the Jungle Book; Alice in Wonderland; Black Beauty (not racist, it's about a horse); Dr. Doolittle; Just So Stories
- The Harry Potter series starts off at an advanced middle grade reading level and gradually increases to a young adult reading level
- Another thing that might be fun would be books of myths from various cultures. I remember reading a big book of Norse myths and another of Greek myths around age 8-9. You could probably start with a collection from a culture you're already familiar with, which could assist with understanding.
Edited to add: your written English is excellent!
- 99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
- Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
- Yeah, this was actually a huge controversy a few years ago and actually happened with digital ebooks. Some older Roald Dahl books, such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, had their language updated by the copyright holders, and the changes were automatically pushed to people’s Kindles silently updating the versions they already owned.
https://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/ronald-dahl-...
- Interesting life-imitates-art moment reading that he tried this flavor-changing chewing gum and then noticed that his taste was restored when he ate a blueberry.
In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Willy Wonka formulates a new kind of gum that provides the flavor of a full-course meal in a single stick. Violet Beauregarde steals and chews a piece, but the formula hasn't been worked out yet so when it gets to the blueberry pie she plumps up and turns into a giant human blueberry.
