In honor of the new Tim Burton/Johnny Depp version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory which we are not going to see (in order to preserve the magic of the book and because I've decided that Tim Burton, and Johnny Depp for that matter, just don't suit my own vision of the book), we decided to reread it, since Davy (now 4.5 years old) doesn't remember our last go-round.
The kids enjoyed it so much that they went scrambling to the bookshelf to find more books by Roald Dahl (hint -- move your cursor over the Glass Elevator), and we decided to have an RD festival. We just finished Fantastic Mr. Fox, with fantastic illustrations by Jill Bennett -- whose I much prefer to Quentin Crisp -- and have started Danny, the Champion of the World.
I've read that Dahl's family gave him a rather Viking-type funeral when he died in 1990. They buried him with his snooker cues, some red wine, chocolates, HB pencils and a power saw, the last of which seems very appropriate for some of the adult fiction he wrote. Not a bad substitution, by the way, for those Goosebumpish books.
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