Reading with the Grandies 31: Roald Dahl, Grug and the Bus Book

In the months since I last posted about Ruby’s reading, she has discovered Roald Dahl, and her little brother has started asking to be read to from what he calls the ‘Bus Book’.

Roald Dahl, James and the Giant Peach (© 1961, illustrations © Quentin Blake 1995, Penguin Random House 2016)
—–, Fantastic Mr Fox (© 1970, illustrations © Quentin Blake 1996, Penguin Random House 2016)
—–. The BFG (© 1982, illustrations © Quentin Blake 1982, Puffin 1985)

Whatever else you might think about Roald Dahl (and I know there are people would keep him away from young children because of what they see as cruelty), his sentences are a joy to read aloud, and evidently a joy to hear, while his plots are full to bursting with vividly imagined incidents. We’ve read James and the Giant Peach more than once, a couple of pages at a time. We’ve reached page 54 or so of The BFG, in one sitting, but will probably take a while to return to it because something about it is too scary.

Fantastic Mr Fox has been an amazing success. Currently we see Ruby for a couple of hours in the afternoon two days a week. On half a dozen successive Nanna-and-Poppa afternoons, she has asked for Fantastic Mr Fox, and listened to the whole book in a single sitting. Once or twice she has agreed to have something else as an appetiser, but this is the book she wants, and she wants it all. At first, she would cover her ears to mute the bits she found scary, but by the most recent reading she stayed for everything. As the non-reading grandparent, it’s wonderful to watch her absorption in the story, and her intent study of Quentin Blake’s illustrations.

I hope we can keep Wes Andersen’s travesty of a film out of the picture until it’s too late for it to spoil anything. And I expect Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which I loathe for its, well, cruelty as well as its racism and gooiness, can’t be too far away. But for now, we’re having a ball.

Ted Prior, Grug and the Big Red Apple (1979)
Daria Solak, Big Wide Words in the Neighbourhood (Hardie Grant 2022)
Claire Laties-Davis (text), Kazia Dudziuk (illustrations), Britannica’s First 150 Words (Britannica Books 2021)

As Charlie’s second birthday approaches, his interest in story isn’t as intense as his big sister’s. He loves spreads where we name an object and he finds it. The pages he comes back to again and again, and then is reluctant to leave, have pictures of buses, cars and especially TRUCKS. These two books, with illustrations by Daria Solak and Kazia Dudziuk respectively, stand out for their surprising choices of words, and unconventional illustrations.

Grug and the Big Red Apple, on the other hand, is a story that does the trick. The introductory bits where Grug, the mysteriously animate scrap of Australian flora, finds the apple, and the bit where Clara the carpet snake coils around the apple in order to move it – all that’s well and good, but we all love the last few spreads where the apple looms larger and larger in the foreground while Grug looks hungrier and hungrier beside it, and then, turn the page and all that’s left is a tiny core and a sated Grug. Yay for story!