Sunday, May 17, 2009

10 Books A Day: #28

Boy: Tales of Childhood...Roald Dahl...Puffin

Going Solo...Roald Dahl...Penguin

Esio Trot...Roald Dahl...Puffin

The Twits...Roald Dahl...Bantam Skylark

The Magic Finger...Roald Dahl...Puffin

Fantastic Mr. Fox...Roald Dahl...Puffin

The Witches...Roald Dahl...Puffin

The Enormous Crocodile...Roald Dahl...Bantam Skylark

Danny the Champion of the World...Roald Dahl...Bantam

The BFG...Roald Dahl...Puffin

George's Marvelous Medicine...Roald Dahl...Bantam Skylark

Revolting Rhymes...Roald Dahl...Bantam Skylark


Roald Dahl is another one of those very English writer's whose origins were not quite English; his father was Norwegian, and he spent great formative slabs of his childhood in Norway. What I never quite realized about him before was that he did one film adaptation of Ian Fleming's James Bond books. This in turn led him to doing the script for the film of Ian Fleming's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, in which Dahl elaborated a chef with a secret "foodge" recipe into the eccentric owner of a candy factory; some years after that Dahl's own Charlie and the Chocolate Factory came out. Another interesting fact: Dahl made up the term "gremlin," or at least first recorded the word in published writing. Another fact: Dahl's funniest poetry is written in the manner and style of Hilaire Belloc's The Bad Child's Book of Beasts.

1 comment:

John said...

He was enormously influential (that is, ripped off) by many writers for young 'uns that followed him.