Sleep Interrupted

After a bit of a hiatus over the Christmas period, Ben — accompanied by me and Louise — has restarted his Roald Dahl odyssey with The BFG.

We stopped for well over a week after a couple of chapters because, as far as we could tell, Ben was afraid of the man-eating giants. Here’s my tip on selling the book to the young, male and trepidous: Skip to the end and show them the pictures of the helicopters.

We finished the book tonight. This read was particularly challenging for me because I decided to give all the characters accents. Usually Ben stops me doing this and asks that I read in my “proper voice” but this time he didn’t seem to notice.

In my production, the heroine Sophie was played by Louise. The BFG was played by Justin Lee Collins. Ray Winston voiced all the other giants. The heads of the army and navy were played by Stephen Fry, in best Blackadder Goes Forth style, and the Queen was played by The Queen.

The chapter The Plan was probably the trickiest bit, heavy with dialogue between five different characters. I must admit that on ocassion a few of the characters’ accents got swapped but Ben didn’t seem to notice. It’s nice to have a forgiving audience.

Louise has recently lead a change in Ben’s bedtime reading towards longer stories that take more than a single night to read. In particular, we’ve been working through a lot of Roald Dahl stories: Fantastic Mr Fox, The Twits, James And The Giant Peach and so on.

Now, I’m sure we’ll revisit these because there are certainly levels to the stories and humour that are beyond Ben at the moment. However, they are still entertaining stories for a four year old and his parents, and are certainly not overrated (Dick Bruna, I’m looking at you).

What prompted this post, though, was Charlie And The Chocolate Factory. This book is a positive joy to read as a parent — a rarity in children’s book — and I actively looked forward to reading it each night. The point at which… oh, hang on…

Spoiler Alert! Spoiler Alert!

Where was I? Oh yes… the point at which Charlie finds the golden ticket had me genuinely ecstatic and at the end when Charlie wins the factory I had a lump in my throat. Neither was this enjoyment one-sided; Ben couldn’t go to bed that night before he’d got Louise to come in and tell her all about what had happened.

So, parents of little(ish) ones, pop down the library, pick up a copy and have fun reading it out loud.

News for The Wheel of Time readers I know: Robert Jordan is terminally ill with amyloidosis but is undergoing treatment which may put him into remission. From Christian Schaller.