I'm surprised that it took me this long to get to this classic, but I remember seeing film versions of Toad and being turned off. It might be like having a Michael Scott without a Jim or Pam. But maybe Rat and Mole provide the sanity.

Alan Jacobs's review essay, and Justin Taylor's comments on the review essay. Mere Orthodoxy essay here.

See the 1987 movie here. There are a number of other adaptions.

A. A. Milne (introduction to an edition): "One does not argue about The Wind in the Willows. The young man gives it to the girl with whom he is in love, and, if she does not like it, asks her to return his letters. The older man tries it on his nephew, and alters his will accordingly. The book is a test of character. We can't criticize it, because it is criticizing us. But I must give you one word of warning. When you sit down to it, don't be so ridiculous as to suppose that you are sitting in judgment on my taste, or on the art of Kenneth Grahame. You are merely sitting in judgment on yourself. You may be worthy: I don't know, But it is you who are on trial."

C. S. Lewis ("Membership" in The Weight of Glory): "A dim perception of the richness inherent in [membership] is one reason why we enjoy a book like The Wind in the Willows; a trio such as Rat, Mole, and Badger symbolises the extreme differentiation of persons in harmonious union, which we know intuitively to be our true refuge both from solitude and from the collective" (165). Lewis also praises the "Dulce Domum" chapter in The Problem of Pain (ch. 1).

Tolkien wasn't a fan of the appearance of Pan in "Piper at the Gates of Dawn."

Brian Jacques (the Redwall author) wrote an introduction to the annotated edition.

Read with some friends (Hall of Men group). Some themes discussed included friendship, homecoming (Odyssey connection), bounded communities, character arcs (e.g., does Toad really change? how central is the character arc of Mole, who in some ways begins and ends the book?), etc. For discussion, it could also be interesting to raise the following question: Is it problematic that friendship seems to be prioritized over family? It's about several single dudes. Isn't that weird?

Interesting commentary here.

2024: Read aloud to my youngest. I greatly enjoyed how he grimaced and groaned at Toad’s exploits, and sometimes became very heated about what a “silly ass” Toad is. He chortled for a long time about “whack ‘em and whack ‘em and whack ‘em!”

2023: Read aloud to my Y2. We laughed through most of it and cried when it was over. She asked for an heirloom copy for Christmas. I’ll never not laugh at Toad’s inflated songs, not smile at Mole and Rat’s friendship, or not get warm and snuggly feelings from Badger’s gruff lovableness.

2022: This book is in my top three all-time favorites. I love it so much. It touches on all of the topics that are dearest to me and I cry through a good quarter of it.

2018: I've heard so many times over the years that this book wasn't worth my time: hard to read, archaic, "just a children's story". Hogwash! This rich but simple little story has catapulted to my top ten favorites of all time. Having an understanding of it from reading "Tending the Heart of Virtue" probably helped. Highly recommended!

The struggle is real.

Quintessentially British, The Wind in the Willows follows the adventures of Mole, Ratty, Badger and the eccentric Toad along their riverbank homes through the seasons.

Badger and Toad were by far my favourite characters. Badger, with the gruff exterior, demonstrates a more sensitive side when trying to deal with the extrovert Toad, often defending him against the more easily rattled Ratty. He also has a fondness for the children of the Wild Woods, rescuing lost animals caught out in the snow during the winter time with a quiet confidence. Toad, by comparison, is anything but quiet. He’s widely extravagant, over the top, childish, selfish and indulgent to everyone he meets. He loves his friends dearly, yet still thinks he’s cleverer and more interesting than them and his obsessions with ‘things’ only leads to more trouble for all involved. The relationship between Ratty and Mole in the earlier chapters was nice too, and felt genuine and pure at heart.

And that’s where the positives end. The plot and pacing for this were awful, with entire chapters that didn’t lead anywhere or have any real purpose. The descriptions of the riverbank through the different seasons was incredibly detailed, with lush descriptions of reeds and undulating river bends, but they went on for paragraphs at a time - making this incredibly dull to wade through. If it wasn’t for Toad’s chapters with their action scenes, I honestly don’t think I would have finished this.

If you want incredibly detailed descriptions of the British countryside with an almost no existent plot, this is for you. Otherwise, stick to one of the many movie versions out there (I highly recommend the version with Matt Lucas as Toad).

Old review from 2020 below but don't have much to add in this reread.
___
It was really cute but to whimsical for my liking, think I would enjoy watching a movie adaption instead

A genuinely refreshing little romp through tunnels & pastures. Zen is something that's somehow--& very surprisingly--reached. This is the ultimate impression the reader is left with.

Outstanding, engaging and more fun than Aesop's menagerie, it moralizes vaguely on fidelity, the value of friendships & associations... The final sentence even addresses finally the main target audience-- the 'lil tykes and treasured ones; and even sustains with the theory that looks may be deceiving... the Badger is ultimately not the savage beast you may've erroneously predicted.

Sure, it is rife with discrepancies: a world where humans speak animal & animals speak human. The aid of humans is, I will admit --KAhYYute! There is wisdom in this, far surpassing anything in Disney's* imaginarium. The animals begin to hear a single string, a musical undertone, & this drives their natures and certainly seals their fates.

Which are you? Adventurous Toad? Impressionable Mole? Generous Badger? otter? fox? washer-woman? little girl (remember, womenfolk don't enter the tale until half-way the story!)?... or do you simply presume to know it all, omnipresent, and wise as the wind?

*okay, so obviously the Disney version DOES exist [although, did the ride outright disappear from the Anaheim theme park?]. I'm not stupid... But really the book is a longer journey, more in the literary tradition of Thoreau, and not instantaneous and vapid and bumpy, like the "ride." [But, DID YOU KNOW?!?! You CAN read Kenneth Grahame's entire novel waiting in line for Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. If it still exists.]

This was a trip down memory lane. I liked the stories surrounding Mole, Water Rat, Badger and Toad. Toad getting into trouble with his infatuation with cars. Prison, escape, horse theft, a battle between the weasels, stoats and ferrets symbolizing the working classes. All the stories are entertaining if your a kid and they are imaginative. It is an idyllic view of England and amusing in places.

My problem is that the author wrote the stories for his son Alastair who at the of 20 committed suicide. Its sad to think that apparently Toad was based on his son.

Another children's classic I missed out on during my childhood so I thought I should catch up now.

The main characters here are:
Toad, a drama queen;
Water Rat (Ratty), an outdoors-y guy, and a bit of a dreamer;
Mole, a shy / hesitant but loyal friend, enjoying the outside now that he has a friend to do it with;
Badger, the somewhat antisocial patriarch, who nevertheless cares for the others.

Basically, Ratty and Mole just want to row up and down the river in summer and enjoy the outdoors while badger keeps away from everyone. They meet other animals, such as Otter, a family man, or the Sea Rat. However, the plans of the three friends are often thwarted by Toad and his plans and obsessions since they want to help him, even if he doesn't want their help. And all under the patronage of Pan.

The 12 chapters of this book tell of cameraderie, mischief, adventures, mysticism, morality, a jail-break even ... in short: a romp through what is modelled after idyllic Edwardian England, only populated by animals here.

Originally, the chapters were bedtime stories the author had told his 4-year-old son (who had been born blind in one eye, plagued by health problems throughout his life, and whose nickname was "Mouse"). Whenever the author holidayed, he would send letters home with more of those stories. After retiring early from his job at the Bank of England in 1908, he used these stories as a basis for this book.

I've listened to a Librivox recording (anyone can record their reading of a book and submit it and the guy doing this one was really very good, he was even a quite good singer) but also browsed through my hardcover edition which has some really cute illustrations:




I was often reminded of Jerome K. Jerome's two books of three friends going on vacation and facing quite some throwbacks due to their silliness and clumsiness, only that this book is full of quirky animals instead of humans. The light tone and fun are the same though (although this one is more "innocent", definitely written as innocent bedtime stories for a young child) and I can see how and why so many children have enjoyed this ever since the publication.

This is a review for the children’s classic, The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame with illustrations by Ernest H. Shepard. For my full review of Kenneth Grahame’s original masterpiece, please LINK HERE.

The Wind in the Willows was originally published as plain text, with no illustrations except for a frontispiece by Graham Robertson, but many illustrated, comic and annotated versions of the story have been published subsequently over the years. The one illustrated by Ernest H. Shepard is perhaps the most famous one of these, and sometimes mistakenly thought to be the first, but in fact his 1931 illustrations were the third to be produced.



They are many people’s favourites, perhaps because Ernest H. Shepard’s drawings for A.A. Milne’s “Winnie the Pooh” in 1926 are world-famous, and seem to define the bear decades before Walt Disney got his hands on the idea and “cutseyfied” it. Indeed it is hard to think of the book of “Winnie the Pooh” without Ernest H. Shepard’s inimitable style. Yet the book was around, and immensely popular, for twenty years without them.

In a way, Ernest H. Shepard seems to have been an odd choice for an illustrator of soft toys or anthropomorphised animals, as his characters often have their faces hidden, or shadowed. Perhaps it is less so in “Winnie the Pooh”, but in The Wind in the Willows, the animal’s faces often seem curiously blank. Ernest H. Shepard worked in India ink and pen, in a kind of scratchy style, with a lot of cross-hatching. It is to be remembered that the original drawings were just these black and white line drawings, whether for all A.A. Milne’s books or for The Wind in the Willows. The “colouring-in of illustrations”, as the publisher Methuen refers to the watercolour addition, was completed in 1970 and 1971.



If I am honest, these are not my favourite illustrations, out of the plethora available, including some by Arthur Rackham, a few years later. I do feel a great affection for them, however, because of their associations. This trio of Kenneth Grahame, A.A Milne, and Ernest H. Shepard seem inseparable. Both authors wrote children’s stories with a similar feel, at a similar time. Both were illustrated by Ernest H. Shepard. And to clinch this connection, A.A Milne adapted part of The Wind in the Willows to produce his own stage play, “Toad of Toad Hall” which is still very popular.

I feel like I have been in a bit of a reading slump lately. It is not that I am reading a whole lot less, I am just not REALLY enjoying the time that I am reading. It might be that the whole family is in back to school mode, so schedules have changed. Or, maybe just the general ups and downs of life will occasionally put me in a “low interest in reading” category. All of this just to say that The Wind in The Willows is another victim of my “reading is meh” state.

When I first started this, I tried to read it to my kids every night. I figured since it was written for a younger crowd and I found it in the kid’s books section at the library it might be perfect for them. I recently read The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe to them and they loved it. So, this would be the next best step, right? Nope . . . they were not interested at all. We sat down for about 10 nights straight trying to read this and they quickly lost interest, loudly exclaiming “I’m bored” after a few pages. Around 40 or 50 pages in I finally gave up.

Then I went on to reading it on my own. Maybe my experience was tainted by my disgruntled children, but I was not getting much more excited about it than they did. Every time I read it I had to force myself to refocus as my mind was wandering. Now, this is not a complicated book, so the fact that I was losing touch with the content was definitely a red flag. And, I think another thing about it that was frustrating was that most of the book is really long run on sentences with lots of commas. You might think that doesn’t make a difference, but it is quite taxing on the brain when sentence after sentence goes on and on without a break. I kept wanted to yell “yes, yes, I get it! You can stop now!”

For many, this is a classic. If it was released now, I am not sure if it would be met with the same excitement. The story is kind of silly, which is okay as it is for kids. But, since it didn’t keep my kids interested, it must not be the right kind of silly. I need to look into the background of this story as I am sure that the anthropomorphic woodland creatures interacting with humans in a normal fashion must be an allegory for something. Or, maybe it all doesn’t mean anything. Either way, I am glad it is finally done and, on the bright side of things, I can check another classic off the list!

Gentle British Bedtime Story

Published in 1907, The Wind in the Willows is decidedly British literature. Before even getting to the exclamation of “Stuff and nonsense!", there is some mild swearing and sophisticated vocabulary for a children’s book.

The book focuses on a cast of animals and their adventures: Mole, Rat, Badger, and (my personal favorite) Toad.

The world is cozy, and I found myself breaking out randomly in smile while reading this.

Although this comfort read is enjoyable, the paragraphs are too long. I had to dust off my trusty dyslexic bookmark which has a transparent yellow pane which isolates one line of text at a time. Therefore, my suggestion would be to listen to the audiobook especially if you want to listen to something soothing.

2025 Reading Schedule
JantA Town Like Alice
FebtBirdsong
MartCaptain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
AprtWar and Peace
MaytThe Woman in White
JuntAtonement
JultThe Shadow of the Wind
AugtJude the Obscure
SeptUlysses
OcttVanity Fair
NovtA Fine Balance
DectGerminal

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An Edwardian children's book that ends with the reimposition by force of the traditional squirearchical social order on the upstart lower orders as represented by Weasels, Stoats and Ferrets.

It is a through introduction to traditional British conservatism, of the Country Life rather than the Economist variety, for children with a side order of mild paganism. As such is an unwitting counterpoint to The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.

As with How to Read Donald Duck, once you look at it and shrug off the view that it is just a children's book then the values on show are not so nice. What is it that readers are asked to feel nostalgia for?

This was published in 1908, before Lloyd George prepared his People's Budget in 1909/10, before The Parliament Act of 1911 and at the same time as women were agitating for the vote. There are the book's Weasels, Stoats and Ferrets - so take up your cudgel to uphold Merrie Olde England and our ancestral rights to under occupied manor houses and the freedom to behave with some reckless abandon!

Alternatively we have the nostalgia of The Leisure Class, our heroes are people who don't have to work, who are so different from ordinary people that they don't even have to be human any more and who can indulge themselves as they see fit - save for the inexplicable unreasonableness of the law.

Ultimately it is what is, as we all are, in this particular case a homoerotic fantasy in which all the men and boys can go off and live an upper middle-class life as animals by the river banks without having to deal with the consequences of that decision, the women will still be prepared to do the washing and the ironing apparently, and indeed woe betide the creature that tries to interrupt this way of life. The only duty is to one another, infringement of privilege punishable by violence. For all its emphasis on nature and the river, it is a very inward looking book. It is a closed off world, the industrial, urban society with a market economy is literally populated by a different species. There are few things quite as curious and peculiar as the stories people would like children to delight in.

A timeless classic, and the one book from my childhood which really opened my eyes to how reading can take you away from the world around you. What's not to like about Mole, Water Rat, Badger, and the mischievous Toad, living the quintessential English life by a quiet river, it also speaks volumes as a powerful contribution to the mythology of Edwardian England. Easy to read for young and old, beautifully written by Grahame, it's just simply a great tale. And for a young child it's surely reading heaven, or at least it was when I was a little nipper. Sentimental reading?, absolutely.