Matilda
by Roald Dahl · first published 1988
33% recommend67% neutral
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.
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…Robinson - Awesome book, full of fun things to talk about with your kids. The BFG - This was the start of the Roald Dahl stage for bedtime reading.. It's a great book, one of my favorite Dahl books. Matilda - Reading this as an adult, it was not nearly as fun as when I was a kid, however my son loved it. The Fantastic Mr. Fox - Fun and easy read for the kids. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Pretty…
on “Ask HN: Books you read in 2015?” ↗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.
on “Roald Dahl – the storyteller as benevolent sadist (2010)” ↗…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…
on “Drug Discovered to Regenerate Lost Teeth” ↗I've been reading some of Roald Dahl's Matilda in Scots (scribd subscription). It's fun!
on “Firefox 91 introduces enhanced cookie clearing” ↗…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)…
on “The original “Bambi”” ↗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,…
on “Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books” ↗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.…
on “Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids” ↗…reads aloud for 1+ hours per day, they’ll get a whole pile of practice. By “hard books” I mean that school-age students (age 5+) have no trouble listening to real chapter books (say Charlotte’s Web or Matilda) instead of only short rhyming picture books. I’m sure your son could start handle listening to those when he was 3.5, but he’ll still get something out of listening to them at age 6, as will the slowest…
on “How I Taught My Kid to Read” ↗When you rewrite a book like this, does it reset the copyright? Matilda was set to become public domain in 2060 (70 years after Dahl's death). With the books now owned by a corporation and essentially recreated by them, the copyright extends another fifty years.
on “Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books” ↗…attributed some powerful Jews as (at least part of) that 'secret society' in the real world, yes. I've read those anti-Jewish quotes from Dahl before and his thinking on the matter is pretty clear. But Matilda is a work of fiction. It's not at all strange that he reflected those 'secret power group' conceptions in one of his books with a cabal of witches actually running a fictional book world. But I don't…
on “Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books” ↗And it is superficially similar to the plot of the book Matilda by Roald Dahl, which makes me think that it is not a situation unique to grandparent poster. We will probably never know the number of kids out there that never fulfill their intellectual potential because…
on “Why People Dislike Really Smart Leaders” ↗I agree that any attack on books and literacy is a problem, but let's not pretend it's just the right that's responsible. It's not the right's fault that I now have to wonder if a given copy of Matilda is as it was written or if it's been 'sanitized'. It's not the right that challenges Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird for their depictions of racism. Harry Potter, once feared by the hyper conservatives…
on “Home Libraries Will Save Civilization” ↗…ability to see the before/after diff. There’s actually already precedent for this. Back in 2023, Puffin made changes to many of Roald Dahl’s books to remove some of the more offensive imagery, including in Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and released revised editions. That in itself isn’t necessarily unusual... what made it controversial was that the updates were automatically pushed out to readers…
on “Books Should Update as Software” ↗Matilda by Roald Dahl.
on “Ask HN: Which book have you re-read recently?” ↗That’s fair, yes. I merely meant that Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolatw Factory, Esio Trot and many others are much more deliberately children’s books than just about anything by Pratchett Dahl definitely has decidedly non-children appropriate…
on “Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)” ↗