I may have overestimated how long it was ago (edgy grammar... watch out!), but I think it was still pretty fresh at the time.
You may also remember me from the musical, Jesse: The Boy Who Hated Nearly Everything Like It Was Awful! so what I think of something is not necessarily indicative of what is general versus specific about liking things.
I used to be like YAY ROALD DAHL but after reading his autobiography I was more like AWW ROALD DAHL and then once I tripped gaily through a collection of his short fiction for adults I was quite a bit more like BOO ROALD DAHL and it coloured my feeling toward his children's work in retrospect. He was just such a deeply damaged person, so full of unresolved rage and hate and misanthropy, that I don't really like the idea of him forming a very large part of a child's early understanding of the truth about people. And that's what books are for, right? He just never really strays very far from exalting the occasion of very awful things happening to very awful people, and I think that's morally pretty rude. I understand how he got that way, poor guy had a hell of a time of it, but I feel like presenting his work to kids should require heavy contextualization so as to prevent warping.
Then again, as so many have said before, "I turned out just fine."
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You may also remember me from the musical, Jesse: The Boy Who Hated Nearly Everything Like It Was Awful! so what I think of something is not necessarily indicative of what is general versus specific about liking things.
I used to be like YAY ROALD DAHL but after reading his autobiography I was more like AWW ROALD DAHL and then once I tripped gaily through a collection of his short fiction for adults I was quite a bit more like BOO ROALD DAHL and it coloured my feeling toward his children's work in retrospect. He was just such a deeply damaged person, so full of unresolved rage and hate and misanthropy, that I don't really like the idea of him forming a very large part of a child's early understanding of the truth about people. And that's what books are for, right? He just never really strays very far from exalting the occasion of very awful things happening to very awful people, and I think that's morally pretty rude. I understand how he got that way, poor guy had a hell of a time of it, but I feel like presenting his work to kids should require heavy contextualization so as to prevent warping.
Then again, as so many have said before, "I turned out just fine."