White Noise

Don DeLillo's White Noise has turned into one of my comfort reads at some point in the past year or two, which surprised me. It's such a peculiar book. Admittedly, perhaps I wouldn't think it quite so peculiar if not for the sequence that takes place in Iron City's Germantown--and I'm not suggesting that the sequence is a misstep or something that the reader is the least bit unprepared for. Nor can I imagine how else DeLillo would have concluded the narrative, without that sequence, but that may be the key: I didn't expect a big finish from that book. I thought the Airborne Toxic Event would be the big plot bomb, and everything else would meander around it.

I once read an article (which I can no longer track down) devoted to explaining the author's loathing of White Noise as both overrated and basically empty. According to that critic, one of the text's key failures is the lack of distinction among the different voices; indeed, most of the characters do sound disconcertingly alike. They are all information gatherers. Some, like Heinrich, are more aggressively empiricist than others (e.g. his argument with his father about the ability to conclusively state that it is raining), but they're all prone to asking strings of sometimes unanswerable questions, and to exchanging correct and incorrect information without doing much to distinguish the correct from the incorrect. DeLillo gives the impression that they are breathless with information to convey and exchange and, sometimes, to dissect to the bare bones that might (but probably won't) reveal some nugget of emotional fact.

I'm surprised I like this book, in the end, because DeLillo's style should create the kind of sterile, remote narrative voice and characters that I usually can't appreciate much at all--as is the case with Martin Amis's or James Joyce's fiction. And I don't think it did. But I can't pinpoint how he pulled off that difference, or managed that small but crucial glimmer of warmth in a narrative otherwise swimming in irony.

(Is it just that he likes Jack and Babette and Murray? Or is the difference me, and my ability to identify with these characters? I'm a speculator; I'm notorious for asking peculiar, unanswerable questions.)

Trainspotting

Trainspotting is a one-time comfort read of mine that has completely fallen by the wayside.

Back when I had a heavy courseload and a heavy reading list (roughly, 4-5 full-length novels per week), I just didn't have a whole lot of non-academic books on my shelves, and Trainspotting was one of those few. Its vignette structure was ideal for casual re-reading, and although the material was often brutal, it was easy to skip over certain sections, or put it down and pick it up again randomly.

Trainspotting was also the first movie I saw after moving to a city from my parents' rural house, when I was nineteen. I decided to check it out based on multi-page, glowing reviews and previews in Details magazine (of all places). I saw it twice within a month, both times by myself, once in a first-run theatre downtown, and once in a second-run theatre in a seedier part of town. Probably, I bought the book after seeing the movie. My copy's cover is movie-branded, at any rate, with Ewan McGregor front-and-center, and the orange-white-black-silver colour scheme.

The movie was the better narrative, but the book is much richer in details. The movie tended to conflate certain characters--I dimly remember that the movie's Tommy combined at least two separate characters' storylines, for example. Other narrative threads and characters were dropped entirely. Hence, Renton's disaffected teenaged Goth cousin and his brother, who enlists in the army and is killed in Belfast, are both missing from the movie. Other characters are allowed to appear in the movie but are stripped to the bone, their interiority and often basic identifying details gone.

I liked the movie's Spud, but felt a greater affection for the book's Spud, with all his 'catboys' and 'catgirls,' and his general goodwill or at least harmlessness. I also liked a narrative thread missing from the movie, about an HIV infected character struggling to reveal the diagnosis to his family. This excised material is often my favourite part of Irvine Welsh's world, the source of a few glimmers of warmth in a bleak place. (The movie's Spud was the sole character to carry this burden in the movie, in my opinion.)

I couldn't even guess how many times I read my copy, but I do know it's been years, maybe even ten, since I last read it. Because of the context of my first reading of the book, it's hopelessly dated for me--to the mid-nineties, rather than the book's actual setting in the eighties. It's a relic and not enough time has passed for me to be able to revisit it.

Comfort Reads

I am a re-reader. I have a little stable of books that I read again and again, in increments, in the window of time between when I lay down in bed and I turn out the light. Sometimes, after a few re-readings, I have to retire a book, permanently or for a number of years. In other cases, I half-regret finishing the book (again) because I wish I could still be reading it, and/or could start it again, right away. These are the core books. My top three core books are Lolita, Infinite Jest, and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

• Lolita has, so far, proved inexhaustible, for seventeen years now. I've read it at least 12 times, and probably more than that--the last time, just this past November. It's a rare book in that I read every page, every time. 
  
• Infinite Jest has a lot more material to withstand my exhausting it. I've read the whole text more than once, but I usually do skip certain sections or, at best, skim them.  (It is a lot of book and either the content or the dialect in some sections can be excruciating.)  My copy's about twelve years old now, and I most recently re-read it this past summer, when Infinite Summer was going on--although, I inexplicably stalled out less than fifty pages from the end, this time around.
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay has been holding up very well to re-reading, so far, but it's not as established as the other two, yet.  And there is one section that I read only once, so far. (I suspect that most people familiar with the story could probably guess which section, right away.) I particularly love the earliest sections with the New York setting, and the obvious pleasure that Chabon takes in rending comics into pure text.

"Comfort" read is actually a lousy way to describe these, now that I think about it--the subject matter of all three is grim, at root (i.e. pedophilia, substance abuse, the Holocaust). And all three are difficult, in their own way. But that is where I find the value in them; with these books, I get the benefit of familiarity without the boredom of re-ecountering a fully knowable fictional world. 

Patricia Wentworth

Patricia Wentworth's Miss Silver mysteries are pretty much a straight-up rip-off of Miss Marple. Sure, the characters' detecting methods are different--Miss Silver exploits her governessy authority over middle class characters where Miss Marple pretends to be flustered or befuddled to play up her apparent harmlessness--but they are both Victorian-style spinster lady detectives who knit as they detect, so there's a considerable overlap. (Dorothy Sayers's Miss Climpson, a secondary character in a few of the Peter Wimsey books, is another variation on the type; she's more emphatically Victorian than Miss Marple, and craftier than Miss Silver, and I don't recall many references, if any, to her knitting.)

Miss Marple's narratives sometimes strain credulity a wee bit--there seems to be a disproportionate amount of violent crime in her neck of the woods--but not to the extent that Wentworth's stories do. Christie wrote less than 15 books or story collections featuring Miss Marple, however, where Wentworth made use of Miss Silver more than 30 times, probably exhausting the possible uses of her spinster detective. (Christie was able to get way more mileage out of her eccentric Belgian former policeman, Hercule Poirot.) I think I've written this before, but Wentworth has to work awfully hard to insert Miss Silver into some plots; I suspect she's aware that few characters would cheerfully hire an elderly lady as a private detective, and so throws up her hands and resorts to something implausible just to get the story rolling. Hence, she half-heartedly has Miss Silver vacationing with her niece in the same town where an infamous crime takes place. Or happen to witness a faked shoplifting incident. Or be on the scene investigating a more minor crime before a murder takes place, rendering her available to "chaperone" ladies during their interrogation by official police. Pretty much all of her books also feature a young couple that can only be united by the successful resolution of the mystery; often, one half of the couple knows someone whose own happy marriage was enabled by Miss Silver solving an earlier crime in another book. Plus, Wentworth throws a couple of policemen with loads of social and professional connections into many of the stories, both of whom are always happy to have Miss Silver sort out their cases.

I've read a number of brief articles or blurbs suggesting that Miss Silver mysteries have been unjustly forgotten, but they really aren't as good as Christie's stories in the same vein. They're not only derivative, they're more obviously formulaic. I like them, but they're pretty fluffy.


The Wentworth books I own have pretty harmless cover designs--nothing as awful or just plain ugly as some of my mass-produced Christie paperbacks. This copy of Death At Deep End (a.k.a. Anna, Where Are You?), for example, features the worst of the covers I own. While the actual illustration is pretty stupid, it's not badly drawn, and it's not completely irrelevant to the book's content. The typeface of "Brilliant as Agatha Christie!" looks pretty low-rent, and its placement emphasizes the dead space on the cover all the more; if it weren't there, I feel like the cover would be about 10% better.

Yes, I did throw a completely random percentage into that last sentence, but otherwise, I think that the point stands: it's just not much of a design, and the type slapped across the top of the cover adds a touch of ineptness.




My copy of Wicked Uncle features a cover design that I've seen more often for Wentworth's books. Again, I think the design is neither terrible nor very good. I'm not crazy about all the white space inherent in this design, and find the really long quotation on this particular cover busy. But although I think the cover illustration is too cartoony for even a "cosy" murder mystery, at least I can understand the reasoning underlying that choice i.e. playing up the "cosy" angle. (After all, in a cosy mystery, the murder victim usually deserves his or her fate, so the death isn't really random or scary or a tragedy; if any murder can be called harmless, cosy murders are harmless.)

Still, this kind of cover seems...grandmotherly. Matronly? Spinsterish? I don't know. All it's missing is some kind of stylized feline nosing around the knitting in the logo. I'd kind of feel more embarrassed reading this publicly than I would reading a more luridly designed book.




I do quite like the recent cover series from Hodder's editions of Wentworth's books, with illustrations taken from advertisements circa the time period many of the books were originally published.

Sometimes the product advertised is obvious: 

And sometimes the product being advertised is... not so obvious:

Not all of the drawings are as good as these examples--I have one featuring a sketchy generic blonde standing in a featureless grey-white void--but I find the idea stylish and the uniformity of the covers pretty appealing:




Nice, right?

Christie Covers

I recently bought a pantload of Agatha Christie books from a second-hand store that was selling them off at 50 cents a copy. Most of them were paperbacks from the seventies and eighties, with a few hardcovers and more recent paperbacks thrown in. A lot of the books were from the same publishing house, Fontana, which seemed to favour pretty bad covers.

This is one of their better covers:


This is from the school of "photograph three items relevant to the plot" mystery-novel cover design, but the image itself is better than most--I think it's actually a photorealistic illustration, and not a photograph, which was a good choice for an image that features a stuffed-weasel-thing so prominently. The illustrated version is more stylish and less creepy than a plastic-eyed photograph would have been. (Although, I know I have read this book, and I honestly can't remember where the weasel-stoat creature comes into the story.)

This book cover follows roughly the same design as the one above, although I prefer the previous cover's fonts, and the white band across the bottom of the cover, to this mild tweaking of the format. While this drawing is done in the same skilled photorealistic way as the previous cover, the items illustrated are way more off-putting. I think, as a general principal, I would omit shrunken heads from the cover of a book titled anything other than Shrunken Heads.

This cover would be about ten times better if it had omitted the hand with the chocolate and bullet in the foreground. The illustrator seems to work better with nice straight lines and architectural detail and even reflections than with the always-difficult details of the human hand. At the very least, that nail polish colour was a bad decision.

This cover has a little too much going on, and none of it is drawn particularly well. The way the doorway and the figure in the doorway shade into the void is the first bad touch. The decision to put the flower vase somewhere off the cover but have the flowers themselves drip all over the foreground also seems bizarre, until you realize that the ornate clock had to be crammed in there, too. And I cannot make sense of the flamey-fire-cloudy business shooting out of the clock--that's about what it looks like when you're holding the actual physical copy of this book in your hands.

This cover is less willy-nilly than the one for A Murder Is Announced, but it's still not very well-drawn. The angle of the book when I took this picture actually minimized the problems with proportions--the girl's mouth and jaw seem out of whack both in relation to the giant flower and to the way the head behind that flower ought to be shaped. The effect is unsettling, but I'm not convinced that was the intention.

This is the lone bad cover not from Fontana that I am including here, and it is an excellent example of the "photograph three items" style of cover. I find it notable mostly because the lighting has turned the cat dim and cloudy, as though it were badly edited into this background from an entirely different photograph. The book is old enough that I can't tell if the cat was always dim, or if that is the peculiar and unforeseen result of the colour gradually fading.

And this is my favourite of the covers I picked up: so pulpy. The event that is illustrated actually kind of does happen in the book, but the character is not the kind of lady who dies her hair platinum blonde and runs to the cliffside in a negligee and leopard-print coat. I would be interested to know if this was an existing illustration that the designer noticed could be used here, or if this was a deliberate attempt to sex up the story.

My other pulp cover is less impressive:It's still a pretty stylish/stylized cover, and I like the simplicity; I guess I just wish the background was any colour other than mustard-yellow.

Sayers Covers

Because mystery novels from the 1920s and 1930s were a) hugely popular and b) paperback-format friendly, pretty much all of the books by the major writers from that era, whether cozy or hard-boiled, feature a range of covers from wonderfully apt to puzzling, odd, or off-putting.

Dorothy L. Sayers is one of the less prolific writers from the period. Agatha Christie wrote at least 80 mystery novels and had two major recurring detective-characters; Ngaio Marsh wrote 32 books featuring Roderick Alleyn; not counting posthumous releases, Margery Allingham published 20 books featuring Albert Campion. A slightly later writer who was strongly influenced by Christie, Patricia Wentworth, wrote 32 books featuring her Miss Marple-style spinster detective, Miss Silver. In comparison, the Lord Peter Wimsey books amount to only fourteen titles, although a few additional short stories do appear in a few other story collections. Maybe the more limited number of books prevented cover design teams from succumbing to fatigue, which I think is at work in some of the "slap together three concrete items relevant to the plot and photograph it" style of covers I see on some Christie titles. Fourteen books are not inconsiderable, but the covers for Sayers's books (at least the ones that I happen to own) tend to be much nicer than some of the covers for detective fiction by writers from roughly the same time period.


This is one of the older style of paperbacks I've picked up over the years, dating to sometime in the late seventies, probably. While it's not fantastic, it's also not bad--certainly, it's better than most of the seventies-era book designs I happen to own, whether literary or genre fiction. The book-title-to-author-name ratio is more radical than on other editions, but Sayers's name is always bigger than the book's name. "Dorothy L. Sayers" actually tells you more about the story you're going to read than a generic-mystery title Strong Poison. Also of note is the fact that this is my personal favourite of her books (along with Murder Must Advertise, which is actually a rare example of a book with a relevant and not-exactly-generic title).


This is also an older paperback, from the mid-eighties, and to me it looks like a circa-1986 idea of vintage Englishness. This is possibly my least favourite of the Wimsey covers I own. Again, it isn't terrible, but it is busy, with the Wimsey caricature, the addition of Harriet Vane's name above the title, some gratuitous lines surrounding Sayers's last name, and the quotation from the LA Times. The optic-illusion-ish check on the dead man's shirt isn't helping the overall situation. A narrower range of colours for the illustration, and a relocation of some print below the picture, might improve the cover, but I suspect it's just plain trying to communicate too much information at-a-glance.


This one is not a good cover by any means, but it's so bare bones that there is not much to offend. Four titles, the author's name in a different-coloured band, a drawing of two guys in full evening dress standing in a blue void. Bunter looks all right, if rather saucy-Cockney (which he emphatically isn't in the books), but Wimsey's face is a little...off. The shading on his face is heavy-handed and his lined hair looks like the kind of hair that I, who am not a professional illustrator, would draw. Drawing him with the monocle-in was probably a mistake, given the illustrator's apparent abilities.

This is a nice stylized sort of cover that seems to have been available for about two decades (eighties and nineties), with period-appropriate illustrations and a good font. I've got nothing bad to say about any of the covers I've seen in this series.

This is the most recent style of covers for a series-reissue, and it's one that I like quite a bit. While I'm not always crazy about photographs, these deliberately vintage pictures really work. I've seen a few of these covers, and most of them are careful not to show the pictured person's full face, which keeps the covers abstract despite other period details in the photos.

This cover includes almost as much information as the Busman's Honeymoon cover above, moreover, but has managed it much better. Here's the narrower colour-scale I was talking about; no one slapped gratuitous lines and frames all over the place to split up the pockets of information; the text spacing makes sense. The end product doesn't look all clip-arty the way the Busman's Honeymoon final product does.

I guess I have a lot of negative things to say about that cover described above as "not terrible," but, really, its clumsiness isn't totally off-putting. If the illustrator for the Omnibus above had also drawn a whole bizarrely-scaled but detailed background, and inserted those shading-heavy well-dressed characters into it, that would probably have been a god-awful cover, but the relative restraint there makes the final product okay (if a little amateurish looking, which is a problem throughout that edition--it's possibly the most typo-ridden book I own). I'll take some pictures of the some of the seventies- and eighties-era Agatha Christie paperbacks I've got to really illustrate "terrible" in this genre; there are a few doozies.

Lolita Covers

I have multiple copies of only a few books. Usually, I buy the second copy by mistake, for about a dollar, from the bargain bin of a second-hand bookstore. I have consciously purchased more than one copy of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, and this is a big reason why:

This is the first copy of Lolita that I bought, at a Library sale in a very small town, when I was fourteen or fifteen years old. The cover was intact when I first got it; the front cover has since detached, and started flaking off towards the centre. In another 10-15 years, it will be down to Nabokov's name and the sunglasses.

The publisher of this edition is Corgi, which I think is a British publishing house. I don't own a single other Corgi book, at any rate. This copy is roughly 40 years old, being a 1969 reprint of a 1961 edition.








This was the second version of Lolita I bought, because I am a sucker. Obviously, it's The Anchor Review, not Lolita per se, although there's about sixty pages of the text plus the Nabokov-writing-as-himself addendum about the book that appears at the end of my Corgi copy of the book. This is supposedly the first version of the book that ever appeared in North America. The Olympia Press 2-volume edition was published in 1955, and this was issued in 1957. Putnam published the first American edition a year later.

I haven't actually read anything in this copy (Auden!) and I dropped a whole eight bucks on it.







And this is my current reading copy of the book. The annotations are especially helpful for glossing sentences written in other languages (mostly French). I am particularly fond of the inclusion of an ad that is described in some detail in the book itself--I assumed it was made up for the puposes of the story, but there it is in the end notes.

It's not a cover to write home about, though. The light's a little to mellow to really show that it apparently consists of illustrations of index cards and note paper. I've yet to see a cover for Lolita that I really like, though, even though Vintage got it very right with some other Nabokov books.

Rating Books

I'm not good at reviewing works in ways that will be useful to other people.

I think that problem's pretty widespread, however. I do tend to glance at Amazon's ratings of a book, but at best those are a loose index to how good a book is, and whether or not the book is a "genre" piece is going to skew the rating as well i.e. Patricia Wentworth never wrote a remarkable book in her life, but if you want a cosy-style mystery (complete with a Nice Young Couple who need to be engaged and/or reunited by the last chapter), she's your writer, and a very competent one at that. In fact, she's very good at establishing characters with efficiency, and maintaining that characterization, even when the story is kind of silly. (Wentworth sometimes has to work very hard to get her spinster detective, Miss Silver, involved in the narrative, and tends to skim over the more ludicrous set-ups so she can get on with the mystery). So, as mystery novels, I would tend to rate hers as three-to-four stars, depending on how plausible Miss Silver's entrance into the story is, and how well she handles the crime. As books, though, I would tend to rate most of her stories three stars, with some of the lazier books at two stars. She's never a terrible writer, but she does get rather workmanlike from time to time.

So, I rely on comparisons, often trying to articulate why one novel works or fails in comparison to other novels in the same vein. I have been reading David Foster Wallace's The Broom of the System, and while I enjoy it, I also would describe it as "trying too hard." There's too much cleverness going on, especially too many punny names that draw attention to themselves. Too many of the male characters have started lusting after the protagonist by the mid-point of the novel. The tone changes radically after the first chapter, although the style doesn't. All in all, Broom owes a heavy debt to Pyncheon's The Crying of Lot 49; my library copy of Broom, a hardcover with a really dreadful late-eighties cover illustration, pushes 500 pages. It's possible that the accretion of outrageous characters and details just taxes my patience around the 200 page mark. Of course, that statement probably should include a definition of "outrageous," in the context of a narrative not exactly committed to verisimilitude. Put "outrageous," "silly" and "patience" together, though, and you'll get an idea.

[Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics was similarly show-offy and pleased with itself, so to speak, but more coherent as a story. As a first novel, it's probably a little better than Wallace's Broom, so I will be interested to see how her second novel turns out.]

That said, I do see lots of evidence of the things I really really liked about Infinite Jest. I want to say that Wallace isn't really committed to the reality of the book's Cleveland, with its "rotting mayonnaise" Lake Erie, whereas he took his near-future Boston seriously and thought of it as real. Infinite Jest can also be a very silly book, but I would describe it as more grounded.

Horror for Young People

When I was in grade school, I was a fan of Urban Legend books, of true crime stories, and of those ghost story anthologies aimed at, say, 8 to 10 year olds—Alvin Schwartz’s books are a good example of the genre (and I notice they are also on the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books List of 1990-2000.)

I can’t recall if Schwartz’s books were strictly fiction or if they were marketed as “True Ghost Stories.” I read more than one of the "true" ghost story type, running into the same eight or nine ghosts that could be "proved" somehow, e.g. The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall, whose name is imprinted in my brain forever because of seeing that same photograph a dozen times in different scary books.

I was too old to have much interest in R.L. Stine—his Goosebumps books got hugely popular when I was already reading Stephen King and Dean Koontz and similar popular adult horror novelists' works. I did read a few of his teen-oriented Fear Street books, but even they seemed "young" for me before I started high school. I couldn't name a single title or storyline from book in the series now. In grades seven and eight I was reading other one-off young adult titles by a variety of authors, usually the ones issued with similar cover templates by Scholastic, circa the late 1980s. (This page on Amazon shows the kind of cover I remember, but if you try the “Closer Look” option, it reverts to the more recently issued covers.) The design decision was a smart move on Scholastic’s part, because I was always willing to give a book with that kind of cover a shot, even though I knew nothing of the author or plot.

I’ve forgotten most of those books, with the exception of the Christina series by Caroline B. Cooney, which were very oddly written compared to most of the teen horror books circulating around that time—Cooney was working hard to develop atmosphere and a specific setting in detail (coastal Maine), and the books include some passages that were practically experimental writing, to the eyes of a twelve-year old. I do also remember the book Prom Dress by Lael Littke, which is, of course, about a cursed prom dress. Even on my first reading of that one, the premise didn’t strike me as all that terrifying—it’s a dress, not a vampire. Put it in a bonfire if you really think it’s cursed. Job done. I recall that book mainly because one scene involves a badly injured girl, still in the (cursed) dress, arriving at the hospital, whereupon a nurse—a grown woman—is so overcome with the (cursed) beauty of the dress that she takes care not to cut it off the injured girl. Then she steals it. There’s a lot of dress-stealing in that book.

Roald Dahl

As I kid, I liked books that were a) scary, b) funny, or, best of all, c) a combination of the two. No wonder, then, that Roald Dahl was my favourite writer for years and years. I loved the two books about Charlie (and the Chocolate Factory, and The Great Glass Elevator) and James (and the Giant Peach), but I was obsessive about The Twits. It was short enough to read several times every time I withdrew it from the library, and I withdrew it from the library enough times that I distinctly remember my mom asking what was wrong with me, that I had to keep reading that same book. I probably couldn’t explain it to her. Even now, I’m not sure what I found so compelling about a story that had not a single human character to root for.

One thing I know I liked about the Roald Dahl books was the choice of illustrations. I’ve become fussy about the illustrations included in books, and usually can only like the versions I was first exposed to. So, when it comes to Alice in Wonderland, I only like the Tenniel woodcuts, and when it comes to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I’ve only ever liked the Joseph Schindelman drawings. I’m not sure if the Schindelmans are the originals—several websites (and several booksellers on ABE books) indicate that he illustrated the 1964 edition, so it seems likely. I also know, however, that the imperialist / racist overtones of the Oompa-Loompas were revised at one point—the “pygmies” were turned into tiny hippies—and Schindelman was definitely drawing cheerful little hippies in the books I read. My research skills regarding the details (rather than existence) of first editions is pretty bad, so I haven’t a clue how to confirm whether Schindelman revised his illustrations at a later date, or if the American edition took a different approach from the beginning, and only the British editions needed to be revised, etc. At any rate, I can only accept the bearded, long-haired Oompa-Loompas as the real deal, and that attitude is one reason why I never much liked the seventies movie version of the book. Everyone agrees that those Oompa-Loompas were freaky, but they repulsed me on multiple levels. Plus, I’ve never been a fan of musicals. Mom once asked me whether I liked the movie version of Annie after they showed it to us in the first grade (our school was putting on the musical that year) and I remember telling her that I thought it was okay, except for the singing. She pointed out that the singing was kind of the point of the movie, and I found that hard to believe. That Broadway-style belting made me feel embarrassed on behalf of the singers.

So, only Schindelman will do. Not even Quentin Blake’s drawings are good enough, and I loved his work in The Twits and The Witches. No one knows how to draw a filthy beard like Quentin Blake. My current copy of The Great Glass Elevator kind of sucks because of its dated illustrations—pure seventies stuff, with Grandpa Joe sporting a lame neckerchief, and Charlie as an apple-checked, well-fed young lad, despite the fact that he was nearly starving up until the morning he entered the factory.

In addition to illustrations, Dahl always incorporated a lot of descriptions of food and of bizarre places. One of my favourite parts of the first Charlie involved the brief descriptions of passing scenes as they were shooting around the factory in the elevator. I felt a little disappointed that the characters never got to actually visit some of those scenes, but if the book has fully met my expectations in that regard, it would have been about 500 pages longer. Leaving the reader wanting more was probably a better strategy.