Matilda

That is a fib.

What is the full name of the smart, book-loving little girl in Roald Dahl's 1988 novel Matilda? Matilda Wormwood.

And that is time.

That's all the time.

But I think it might be getting better, I don't know.

Hi, please could we have a shout out for Immy, who is five, Matilda, who is one, and Ollie, the dog, from Knutsford, who listen every night before bed.

They love all your stories, especially Don't Open This Book.

Immy thinks that this one is very funny and we often listen to it again and again.

I didn't know that.

Thank you, Immy.

And thank you, Ollie, the dog, and Matilda, for your super great question.

Another question.

and you're facing it forward so therefore it's like it's called a portmanteau and oh my god Oh my goodness, what's the name of the author? I've got to touch it all the time.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, Roald Dahl, sorry.

That's okay.

Roald Dahl was an absolute master at workman's role books.

love um Roald Dahl I mean obviously the the author of the original book known for being kind of a weird twisted storyteller

and I loved his books yeah growing up like James and the Giant Peach the BFG oh yeah loved and witches Matilda Matilda yeah my daughter doesn't want to read Matilda and I'm like oh okay girl weird has she seen the movie Oh.

Oh.

I don't know.

there's nowhere else you can sort of randomly pick that up as a child, you know, unless you were obviously reading those sorts of books.

And then I was looking at Matilda, for example, I read a lot of the Roald Dahl books and thinking about words such as gormless and twaddle, which again, they weren't words that are kind of used so much these days, they're a bit out of fashion.

But there were so many kind of interesting words in that book, particularly, That, you know, those are the sorts of things that you pick up that you wouldn't have picked up from normal life.

So I read a lot as a child.

If I said that to you, and I know I'm putting you on the spot, and I probably could ask you every day of the week and it'd be a different book, but has there been a book that's been really, really important to you along the way? It might have been when you were a kid, it might be more recently, non-fiction, fiction, whatever, but what comes to mind when I say that?

Well, there is one book that comes to mind always immediately for me, which is Matilda by Roald Dahl.

You know, I'm definitely not a Matilda.

I'm not brilliant like she was.

But I do think growing up, I was different.

Oh, you'll love it.

And I love

Matilda.

And we've got Puff the Magic Dragon, which is the first one that's coming up.

But we're also going to continue Matilda.

Yeah.

So we have...

Because no one...

We only had one voice on

whether or not we should play Matilda.

Yeah.

But obviously Dahl and Fleming were chummy in some way.

Anyway, Dahl is still best known for his children's books like The BFG, The Witches, Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

My favorite as a kid was always a tie between Matilda and Danny, the champion of the world.

But Dahl also wrote a lot of short stories for an adult audience, many of which are very grim and cynical.

There's one called Lambs to the Slaughter in which a woman murders her abusive husband, who's a policeman, with a shank of lamb.

Yeah.

I mean, it is shocking how grim Dahl's adult stories are.

And to me, when I discovered them after loving Dahl as a kid, I mean, I remember, I don't know, being eight or nine, maybe in fifth grade, so maybe 10 or 11, trying to stay home from school just so I could read Matilda.

Mine is much more middle grady.

Typical, right? Absolute formative book from that first decade, which for me runs from 1984 to 1994, is Matilda by Roald Dahl.

Yeah.

It was my entire personality, and then just subsequent to that first decade, the movie came out in 1996, and it renewed that love and kind of cemented it as this very formative book for me.

There's still a little part of me that is just a little girl who takes out big stacks of books from the library and wants to be able to use my brain to accomplish amazing, wonderful, magical things, which is what Roald Dahl gives us in this story, that you can fight for your friends.

You can be brave even in a scary situation, right? And that was w- who I needed to be fed as when I was a little girl.

So Roald Dahl gave me that, and it's okay that there are complicated feelings now about Roald Dahl because it doesn't change the fact that I wanted to be Matilda when I was growing up.

Right.

Oh yeah, we are going to be starting a new chapter book.

We're going to be starting Matilda by Roald Dahl.

We certainly are.

Well, because there was going to be a bit of hot debate and, you know, suggestions.

And we did get a few suggestions, but we only decided this morning because I love Matilda.

It's a classic, right?

It is a classic, and I really enjoy listening to it.

Yes, let's go.