mariness

1. Over at Tor.com, we're discussing Johnny Depp's portrayal of Willy Wonka. Come chat.

2. And that is finally the end of the Roald Dahl journey. Now, I think it's time to focus on people who are smaller. A lot smaller. With perhaps an introductory book first...

3. This morning I headed out to what will be one of my last trips to the Here Be Dragons Bookshoppe, which alas is having to close down because of the owner's health issues. It's incredibly frustrating: a bookstore selling used and independent books (and the occasional dragon) that's turning a profit...and this. The owner is offering the business for sale, and says she has a couple of interested prospects, so I'll keep my fingers crossed.

A few Tor.com posts went up while I wasn't paying attention:

James and the Giant Peach (the film, not the book).

Friday's Child (Georgette Heyer's first bestselling Regency)

Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory which is still such a terrifying experience that I haven't dared to look at the comments.

On a related note, to answer a couple of lingering questions from ICFA, Tor.com is probably the hands down worst way to contact me. I do have an account there and in theory you can send messages to it. In practice since the only people who were sending messages to that account were people desperate to sell me fake Prada bags or introduce me to new ways of finding porn, I stopped checking it, with the result that you could have a message there for three months before I noticed it.

Over at Tor.com, it's time to chat about The Twits.

I didn't mention it in the post, but one thing I'm noticing in this Dahl reread is how some bits of his books make me feel like a little kid again (the hell in a handbasket joke in Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, or the chocolate river in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) and some bits remind me that I am most definitely not anymore. This particular book made me distinctly feel like a grown-up. Ouch.

And now back to trying to get other stuff done. Grown-up stuff. I am sensing an uncomfortable sort of theme here.

While I was too dizzy to pay attention, my post on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory popped up on Tor.com.

The next post should be on the book's sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. However, this book proved unexpectedly popular in central Florida -- I ordered it several weeks back, but although my account claims it has arrived, it has not in fact done so, and I have some medical stuff upcoming this week (grr.) Which is to say that next week's post may be Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, may be Danny, the Champion of the World, or may be missing entirely. We shall see.

Meanwhile, I need to see if I can drag myself up to return some library books, just so the library doesn't cut me off from their services...

Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl, by Donald Sturrock

Writer Roald Dahl had perhaps two or three calm years in his life, those right after leaving school, when he worked for Shell Oil. Otherwise, his life was crammed with enough incident to fill three dozen biographies: losing a sibling at a young age, getting severely beaten at school, flying, crashing, spying, marrying a Hollywood actress still in love with Gary Cooper, losing a child at the age of seven and watching another beloved child suffer the effects of a horrific accident, nearly losing his first wife to an unexpected major stroke, sleeping with various famous and beautiful women, conducting a years long affair with the woman who would become his second wife, and, of course, writing books.

It's a lot. To his credit, Donald Sturrock manages to get most of this into this fairly long book, in a dispassionate, clear way. Sometimes too dispassionately: Roald Dahl was, by the accounts related in this book, brutal to his wife after her stroke as he pushed her towards recovery, but Sturrock almost bends over backwards to absolve the guy. He deals with Dahl's pain at losing his eldest daughter – a child both parents later idealized – almost clinically. And because Dahl's son Theo, who suffered a terrible accident with resulting brain damage, is still alive and helped contribute to the book, many issues with Theo are notably glossed over, with the focus mostly on how the accident increased Dahl's interest in brain shunts.

Dealing with Dahl's shifting attitudes towards race is another place where Sturrock struggles – partly because Dahl did. He accepted the concept of British superiority while living in Africa, but later changed his mind and argued for racial equality. When he was accused of racist attitudes in the first edition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory he was horrified, but swiftly agreed to changes after the NCAAP pointed out the problems with the original depictions of the Oompa-Loompas, in a case of unintentional but institutional, unthinking racism. (He had originally planned to make Charlie, its young protagonist, black.) He had several Jewish friends, but did not think kindly of the Zionist movement or various Israeli leaders and said various offensive things. And so on.

A book like this almost invariably becomes a gripping read, even despite – or because of – the name dropping that was the result of Dahl's years of work in DC as a diplomat and a spy, and later his life with his actress wife, split between Hollywood and England. (After her stroke, Frank Sinatra stopped by. That sort of thing.) It also becomes a question of choosing which story might be true: Dahl changed his retellings of past events frequently, and his first wife disputed many of his versions – but disputed these versions after the stroke which by all accounts changed her personality and severely disrupted her memory. Other issues, particularly Dahl's work as a spy, remain classified. Sturrock does his best to reconstruct events; where he cannot, he quotes liberally from interviews with various people who knew Dahl.

Dahl was notorious for fighting with editors, agents and publishers; friends, family members and neighbors; and Britain's Inland Revenue. (I have to note that one common thread in all biographies of writers who lived and published in Britain in the post-World War II years: fighting with Inland Revenue.) But he was also notorious for unexpected and fabulous acts of generosity, of loyalty to friends, and above all, the ability to entertain children.

I'm not exactly sure when I'll be reaching the Roald Dahl books in the Tor.com reread projects – and I won't be reading all of them – but this was a good introduction to the imagination behind them.