Matilda
Matilda applies her untapped mental powers to rid the school of the evil, child-hating headmistress, Miss Trunchbull, and restore her nice teacher, Miss Honey, to financial security.
Stats for nerds
7recommend
22mentions
21people
2015–2026years
32% recommend68% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Roald Dahl has been great for the whole family, we do a lot of driving and listen to them in the car. We are very picky about the narrator's voice. Best so far have been The Witches (Miranda Richardson), Matilda (Kate Winslet) and the BFG (David Walliams - I don't like him personally but he is a great reader). Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was a disappointment, the narrator garbles and throws away the lines.
Also David Tennant reading the How To Train Your Dragon series. He is a superb reader with an amazing range. Before he hit the big time with Dr Who he did a lot of radio.
We've also had family members record stories and I've put them onto cards. We gave my son a dictaphone to record his own stuff. He would do great long sagas of mayhem and battle, but he's lost interest in recent months.
- Ugh. I liked Matilda. But Steinbeck? Seriously? To each his own I guess. How Matilda would have been a fan of Steinback is beyond me. Much less Austin. Matilda would have been a fan of, er, uh, Dahl. And maybe Oz, Baum, Seuss, and Carroll. And any other author whose general vibe was "I kinda like to mess with the world." Definitely Orwell as she got older.
- (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.)
- I've been reading some of Roald Dahl's Matilda in Scots (scribd subscription). It's fun!
- I've been going through Roald Dahl with my 5-year-old and it's been delightful. It has kind of made me want to do my own audiobook recording of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. James and the Giant Peach was a hit, of course, as was Matilda. We're doing The Witches right now, which I had never read as a kid. It's kind of at the edge of what my son finds too scary, though.
My son has started to notice that all of Dahl's heroes have terrible family lives in some way, and he's questioned why it's necessary. I think he starts to worry that it might happen to him. I've tried to explain to him that, because the stories aren't real (which is a concept he's comfortable with already), it's a useful shortcut for a writer to make us sympathetic to them. I think he gets it.
- I had no idea The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar was for adults. I read that when I was only eight or so after reading other Dahl books like Matilda and The Witches. I loved the premise.
