I’m also in the in-between, in that I’m for leaving the books as written, while offering young readers a little help with reading between the lines. My kids are older now, and I don’t think we read Dahl together, but if we had, I would have been *that mom* who paused while reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to editorialize about Gloop and his fate, to ask leading questions about what his character suggests about the morality of fatness, and how these views are still around, even though they’re a bunch of junk.
And my kids would have been super annoyed and wanted me to get on with the story...because it’s a great story, and that’s important, too. If it wasn’t, we could just quietly let it go out of print, right?
This is so interesting. I hadn’t heard about the Dahl controversies. It seems silly to me to change literature -- old books are snapshots in time and they allow us to go back and learn what things were like then. It doesn’t feel right to change it. Also, I also loved The Awakening!!!!
I’m also in the in-between, in that I’m for leaving the books as written, while offering young readers a little help with reading between the lines. My kids are older now, and I don’t think we read Dahl together, but if we had, I would have been *that mom* who paused while reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to editorialize about Gloop and his fate, to ask leading questions about what his character suggests about the morality of fatness, and how these views are still around, even though they’re a bunch of junk.
And my kids would have been super annoyed and wanted me to get on with the story...because it’s a great story, and that’s important, too. If it wasn’t, we could just quietly let it go out of print, right?
This is so interesting. I hadn’t heard about the Dahl controversies. It seems silly to me to change literature -- old books are snapshots in time and they allow us to go back and learn what things were like then. It doesn’t feel right to change it. Also, I also loved The Awakening!!!!