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(A-) 84% | Very Good
Notes: All whimsy, vim, if pretty Grimm, on getting just desserts, where self-control's a safety goal and manners never hurt.
*Check out progress updates for detailed commentary:
Progress updates:
01/11/2025 - Preamble
(1) One of my yearly reading goals is to finish at least one "household name" novel.
- I don't mean the YA novel de jour practically no one outside Goodreads has even heard of. I mean a novel pretty much everyone's heard of.
- For various reasons, everyone's heard of this book.
(2) I've never seen either film, nor any adaptation, so this will be completely new to me.
01/14/2025 - Chapters 1–12
(1) For Charlie, unlike the other children, buying chocolate bars expressly to find a Golden Ticket didn't work. It was only when he was at the point of starvation and bought the chocolate for food did he ultimately find one.
- It's a double-whammy, conflating our good feeling about him finally finding a ticket with him overcoming starvation.
- It's the difference between avarice/gluttony as a motivation versus pure necessity/desperation.
(2) Twice at the very start, even before the story begins, we have descriptions of all the children, once in paragraph form and once in point form.
- It's drilled in your head from the outset how each child is distinct and memorable.
- Definitely one-note characterizations, but it's essential base-level understanding that can be built upon. J.K. Rowling did pretty much the same thing with the Hogwarts students, where a lot of them have very ethnic names, which on the one hand can be seen as stereotypical but on the other hand are instantly evocative and distinctive.
- One of my pet peeves is when supporting characters aren't distinctive at all, names don't really mean anything and everyone's just amorphous background players. I remember this being a frustration I had with The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes where it was difficult to tell Clemensia from Lysistrata and Persephone.
(3) It's an awful weird feeling to see several characters here not only described as "fat" but preposterously so.
- You'd never see that today, especially in a kid's book.
(4) Charlie's four grandparents here are all in their 90s, which is quite the generation gap with Charlie.
- Presumably, his parents would be about 40-50.
- The grandparents also seem to be contemporaries with Willy Wonka. They're the ones, not the parents, who are in awe and tell stories about him from the distant past... or at least before they were all bedridden some twenty years prior. This suggests that Willy Wonka is also around 90, or else he's some sort of immortal.
(5) Prince Pondicherry's palace seems to be a kind of fable about being careful what you wish for, like a modern King Midas tale.
- Presumably, the whole episode was intended as a lesson by Wonka, since if he can make ice cream that doesn't melt, then he can surely make chocolate that doesn't melt either.
- It also suggests that Wonka is a magical figure, possibly a trickster god, because he builds the palace quick enough that it doesn't melt from the Indian heat but where it quickly and completely melts down soon after.
(6) "And of course now, when Mr. Wonka invents some new and wonderful candy, neither Mr. Fickelgruber nor Mr. Prodnose nor Mr. Slugworth nor anybody else is able to copy it."
- I appreciate the liberal and correct application of "nor," which you hardly ever see nowadays. It sees extensive use throughout this book.
(7) At the outset, we're teased with the mystery of what's behind the locked doors of Wonka's factory.
- Thousands of workers are suddenly replaced by mysterious and minute shadowy figures.
- Obviously, the factory is never subject to health inspections.
(8) One thing Dahl is exceptional at is setting up expectations, almost belaboring them, only to suddenly subvert them. It's the ability to make mundane things seem miraculous.
- Charlie fails to find the Golden Ticket three separate times before he finally does.
- Grandpa Joe is the oldest of the grandparents and hasn't left his bed for twenty years before he jumps out of bed and begins to dance.
(9) Charlie finds a dollar bill in the street, later he receives change in dimes, which I suppose means that this takes place in America, unless there's a separate British version.
- I'd always presumed British authors set their stories in Britain, no less because of the British grammar and vernacular.
- It's meant I've had to change the accents in my head when reading this.
- Alternatively, we could be in an alternate history where, probably post-WWII, the UK adopted American currency.
01/15/2025 - Chapters 13–21
(1) "'Are the Oompa-Loompas really joking, Grandpa?' asked Charlie. 'Of course they're joking,' answered Grandpa Joe. 'They must be joking. At least, I hope they're joking. Don’t you?'"
- Grandpa Joe's "I hope they're joking" signals that they may not be. It casts an ominous sliver of doubt over the Oompa-Loompas and by extension Willy Wonka.
- Awful things are happening to children in this wonderland and it's slowly turned from wonderous to dangerous.
(2) Willy Wonka's described as wearing a black hat and sporting a black goatee. Which isn't an image that quite correlates with popular conceptions.
- The black goatee makes him seem devious, devilish even.
- Though the plum velvet coat and bottle green trousers are on point.
(3) The initial scenes in the chocolate factory are just bursting with energy and enthusiasm.
- The whole thing's treated like a circus and Willy Wonka's like the happiest, most manic, ring master.
(4) The Oompa-Loompas are tiny men with rosy-white skin and long golden-brown hair.
- Again, completely different from the image that's been engrained in my head. I'd never have imagined Smurf-sized Tarzans.
- It's fairly clear that Oompa-Loompas were inspired by African pygmy tribes. Though, as with most things here, they're inherently contradictory. For example, they live in the jungle and men only wear deer skins. I'm no zoologist, but I don't think jungle deer are a thing. The place they're native to in no way correlates to the world we know.
(5) For a children's book, the humor here is pretty dark. Especially when it comes to the songs Oompa-Loompas sing.
- They sing about Augustus Gloop being ground up, sliced, boiled and turned into fudge.
- They sing about Violet Beauregarde biting her tongue in two, going dumb, and spending the rest of her days in a sanatorium.
- It's the sort of stuff you'd expect out of The Brothers Grimm, except these are only jokes and don't actually happen.
(6) Willy Wonka warns Mike Teavee not to lick the candy boat because it will get sticky.
- But, it's a boat... it's meant to get wet.
- Though, perhaps the river being chocolate means it won't act as a solvent.
(7) Willy Wonka's whole "nothing to see here" attitude as they sail through the tunnel got some audible laughs from me.
- Cracks are beginning to form in his immaculate facade and we get hints of nefarious goings on.
(8) Charlie and Grandpa Joe are offered cups of river chocolate by Willy Wonka. They're the only ones out of the whole group.
- Unlike the other children, Charlie only takes chocolate or sweets when offered. The children who take without asking suffer humiliating and potentially life-threatening consequences.
- Like fables and folk stories of old, this is very much a cautionary tale for children: listen to adults, don't take what isn't yours, don't be impulsive or greedy. In other words, act like Charlie, and not the others, and you won't be sucked-up/stuck-in vacuum tubes or swell up into a giant blue ball.
01/16/2025 - Chapters 22–30
(1) The Oompa-Loompas get drunk on butterscotch and buttergin.
- Predictable, really. They're quite literally lightweights.
- Makes me wonder if Hogwarts students regularly get drunk on butterbeer.
- This story's definitely got Grimm sensibilities. Outright drunkenness or alcoholism isn't something you really see in modern children's fiction.
(2) Willy Wonka's kind of a nasty piece of work. He has no tolerance for the ill-mannered, yet he outright scolds two of the three remaining children in front of their parents.
- He scolds Mike Teavee for mumbling and interrupting and Veruca Salt for being impatient.
- It's revealed at the very end, but it's quite clear here, that Willy Wonka has no children. The fact that he expects kids to act like adults and doesn't have any patience or grace for any sort of childishness only telegraphs this. An ironic attitude for a candy-maker.
(3) The "square candies that look round" is the first instance of outright magic and/or magical creatures here. Up to this point, everything's been relatively real-world plausible, or arguably science fiction.
- It's clearly an intentional cross into the fantastic, since the same pun of "squares that look" could have been achieved by something sciency or mechanical. Instead, Oompa-Loompas literally paint faces on square candies that subsequently come alive. It implies the Oompa-Loompas too are perhaps magical creatures.
(4) Veruca's fate for being an impulsive and entitled brat is to be swarmed and pinned down by squirrels and then dumped down a garbage chute toward an incinerator, which is pretty horrifying.
- Willy Wonka just laughs it off like some inhuman space alien or deity: amused if unconcerned with human welfare. Which contrasts with his over-concern with manners and politeness.
(5) The whole thing gets very Hunger Games toward the end.
- Kids drop one by one, in big and showy fashion, until it's just Charlie and Mike Teavee left.
(6) Willy Wonka reveals that he eats cabbage and potatoes, not candy as you'd expect.
- Definitely a dealer who's careful not to get high off his own supply.
- If you remember from the very start of the book, cabbage and potatoes are the only food Charlie and his family can afford to eat. Here we get a direct correlation between Wonka and Charlie's family which suggests an underlying affinity despite outward differences in temper, energy and ostentation.
- It's yet another subverted expectation, which this book has no shortage of.
(7) "Charlie experienced a queer sense of danger. There was something dangerous about this whole business, and the Oompa-Loompas knew it."
- Wait, now he senses danger? The book's almost over.
- Seems to me, the whole thing became one big flashing red light of danger the moment Augustus Gloop fell into the chocolate river and got sucked into the factory pipes.
(8) Mike Teavee's parents worry about him being split into pieces from teleportation gone awry.
- Seems an awful lot like getting splinched in Harry Potter.
- I can understand Mike Teavee's television watching obsession as a primary character motivation, but I don't know if that necessarily translates to literal transmission through the airwaves. It's not as one-to-one as Augustus Gloop's need to eat or Violet Beauregarde's need to chew gum or Veruca Salt's need to get everything she desires.
(9) The Oompa-Loompa's song about Mike Teavee is double-length.
- The first half is the usual dark mockery, but the second half almost seems like an anti-television/pro-reading propaganda piece or campaign ad.
- You could easily replace TV with smart phones and convey exactly the same sentiment to modern audiences. Though, I guess it's basically the same idea. The main difference being that you can't just decide to watch TV in the middle of a conversation. TV watching is a more focused activity whereas smart devices are more intermittent.
(10) This edition ends with sample sections from Matilda, which I'll just skip since I already plan to read it sometime down the line.
(11) Ultimately, I feel around the same way about this as I did with the first Harry Potter book: it's wildly imaginative, clever, and close to a 5-star read for most of it, but ends pretty flat and a bit of a letdown.
- I actually see a whole lot of J.K. Rowling in Dahl, who I can only guess was a major influence on her work.
- Still, a great story and an unequivocal recommendation. For me, it just finished a bit too conventionally "happily ever after," whereas the book had been hitherto wildly unconventional, mischievous and sardonic.
Notes: All whimsy, vim, if pretty Grimm, on getting just desserts, where self-control's a safety goal and manners never hurt.
*Check out progress updates for detailed commentary:
Progress updates:
01/11/2025 - Preamble
(1) One of my yearly reading goals is to finish at least one "household name" novel.
- I don't mean the YA novel de jour practically no one outside Goodreads has even heard of. I mean a novel pretty much everyone's heard of.
- For various reasons, everyone's heard of this book.
(2) I've never seen either film, nor any adaptation, so this will be completely new to me.
01/14/2025 - Chapters 1–12
(1) For Charlie, unlike the other children, buying chocolate bars expressly to find a Golden Ticket didn't work. It was only when he was at the point of starvation and bought the chocolate for food did he ultimately find one.
- It's a double-whammy, conflating our good feeling about him finally finding a ticket with him overcoming starvation.
- It's the difference between avarice/gluttony as a motivation versus pure necessity/desperation.
(2) Twice at the very start, even before the story begins, we have descriptions of all the children, once in paragraph form and once in point form.
- It's drilled in your head from the outset how each child is distinct and memorable.
- Definitely one-note characterizations, but it's essential base-level understanding that can be built upon. J.K. Rowling did pretty much the same thing with the Hogwarts students, where a lot of them have very ethnic names, which on the one hand can be seen as stereotypical but on the other hand are instantly evocative and distinctive.
- One of my pet peeves is when supporting characters aren't distinctive at all, names don't really mean anything and everyone's just amorphous background players. I remember this being a frustration I had with The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes where it was difficult to tell Clemensia from Lysistrata and Persephone.
(3) It's an awful weird feeling to see several characters here not only described as "fat" but preposterously so.
- You'd never see that today, especially in a kid's book.
(4) Charlie's four grandparents here are all in their 90s, which is quite the generation gap with Charlie.
- Presumably, his parents would be about 40-50.
- The grandparents also seem to be contemporaries with Willy Wonka. They're the ones, not the parents, who are in awe and tell stories about him from the distant past... or at least before they were all bedridden some twenty years prior. This suggests that Willy Wonka is also around 90, or else he's some sort of immortal.
(5) Prince Pondicherry's palace seems to be a kind of fable about being careful what you wish for, like a modern King Midas tale.
- Presumably, the whole episode was intended as a lesson by Wonka, since if he can make ice cream that doesn't melt, then he can surely make chocolate that doesn't melt either.
- It also suggests that Wonka is a magical figure, possibly a trickster god, because he builds the palace quick enough that it doesn't melt from the Indian heat but where it quickly and completely melts down soon after.
(6) "And of course now, when Mr. Wonka invents some new and wonderful candy, neither Mr. Fickelgruber nor Mr. Prodnose nor Mr. Slugworth nor anybody else is able to copy it."
- I appreciate the liberal and correct application of "nor," which you hardly ever see nowadays. It sees extensive use throughout this book.
(7) At the outset, we're teased with the mystery of what's behind the locked doors of Wonka's factory.
- Thousands of workers are suddenly replaced by mysterious and minute shadowy figures.
- Obviously, the factory is never subject to health inspections.
(8) One thing Dahl is exceptional at is setting up expectations, almost belaboring them, only to suddenly subvert them. It's the ability to make mundane things seem miraculous.
- Charlie fails to find the Golden Ticket three separate times before he finally does.
- Grandpa Joe is the oldest of the grandparents and hasn't left his bed for twenty years before he jumps out of bed and begins to dance.
(9) Charlie finds a dollar bill in the street, later he receives change in dimes, which I suppose means that this takes place in America, unless there's a separate British version.
- I'd always presumed British authors set their stories in Britain, no less because of the British grammar and vernacular.
- It's meant I've had to change the accents in my head when reading this.
- Alternatively, we could be in an alternate history where, probably post-WWII, the UK adopted American currency.
01/15/2025 - Chapters 13–21
(1) "'Are the Oompa-Loompas really joking, Grandpa?' asked Charlie. 'Of course they're joking,' answered Grandpa Joe. 'They must be joking. At least, I hope they're joking. Don’t you?'"
- Grandpa Joe's "I hope they're joking" signals that they may not be. It casts an ominous sliver of doubt over the Oompa-Loompas and by extension Willy Wonka.
- Awful things are happening to children in this wonderland and it's slowly turned from wonderous to dangerous.
(2) Willy Wonka's described as wearing a black hat and sporting a black goatee. Which isn't an image that quite correlates with popular conceptions.
- The black goatee makes him seem devious, devilish even.
- Though the plum velvet coat and bottle green trousers are on point.
(3) The initial scenes in the chocolate factory are just bursting with energy and enthusiasm.
- The whole thing's treated like a circus and Willy Wonka's like the happiest, most manic, ring master.
(4) The Oompa-Loompas are tiny men with rosy-white skin and long golden-brown hair.
- Again, completely different from the image that's been engrained in my head. I'd never have imagined Smurf-sized Tarzans.
- It's fairly clear that Oompa-Loompas were inspired by African pygmy tribes. Though, as with most things here, they're inherently contradictory. For example, they live in the jungle and men only wear deer skins. I'm no zoologist, but I don't think jungle deer are a thing. The place they're native to in no way correlates to the world we know.
(5) For a children's book, the humor here is pretty dark. Especially when it comes to the songs Oompa-Loompas sing.
- They sing about Augustus Gloop being ground up, sliced, boiled and turned into fudge.
- They sing about Violet Beauregarde biting her tongue in two, going dumb, and spending the rest of her days in a sanatorium.
- It's the sort of stuff you'd expect out of The Brothers Grimm, except these are only jokes and don't actually happen.
(6) Willy Wonka warns Mike Teavee not to lick the candy boat because it will get sticky.
- But, it's a boat... it's meant to get wet.
- Though, perhaps the river being chocolate means it won't act as a solvent.
(7) Willy Wonka's whole "nothing to see here" attitude as they sail through the tunnel got some audible laughs from me.
- Cracks are beginning to form in his immaculate facade and we get hints of nefarious goings on.
(8) Charlie and Grandpa Joe are offered cups of river chocolate by Willy Wonka. They're the only ones out of the whole group.
- Unlike the other children, Charlie only takes chocolate or sweets when offered. The children who take without asking suffer humiliating and potentially life-threatening consequences.
- Like fables and folk stories of old, this is very much a cautionary tale for children: listen to adults, don't take what isn't yours, don't be impulsive or greedy. In other words, act like Charlie, and not the others, and you won't be sucked-up/stuck-in vacuum tubes or swell up into a giant blue ball.
01/16/2025 - Chapters 22–30
(1) The Oompa-Loompas get drunk on butterscotch and buttergin.
- Predictable, really. They're quite literally lightweights.
- Makes me wonder if Hogwarts students regularly get drunk on butterbeer.
- This story's definitely got Grimm sensibilities. Outright drunkenness or alcoholism isn't something you really see in modern children's fiction.
(2) Willy Wonka's kind of a nasty piece of work. He has no tolerance for the ill-mannered, yet he outright scolds two of the three remaining children in front of their parents.
- He scolds Mike Teavee for mumbling and interrupting and Veruca Salt for being impatient.
- It's revealed at the very end, but it's quite clear here, that Willy Wonka has no children. The fact that he expects kids to act like adults and doesn't have any patience or grace for any sort of childishness only telegraphs this. An ironic attitude for a candy-maker.
(3) The "square candies that look round" is the first instance of outright magic and/or magical creatures here. Up to this point, everything's been relatively real-world plausible, or arguably science fiction.
- It's clearly an intentional cross into the fantastic, since the same pun of "squares that look" could have been achieved by something sciency or mechanical. Instead, Oompa-Loompas literally paint faces on square candies that subsequently come alive. It implies the Oompa-Loompas too are perhaps magical creatures.
(4) Veruca's fate for being an impulsive and entitled brat is to be swarmed and pinned down by squirrels and then dumped down a garbage chute toward an incinerator, which is pretty horrifying.
- Willy Wonka just laughs it off like some inhuman space alien or deity: amused if unconcerned with human welfare. Which contrasts with his over-concern with manners and politeness.
(5) The whole thing gets very Hunger Games toward the end.
- Kids drop one by one, in big and showy fashion, until it's just Charlie and Mike Teavee left.
(6) Willy Wonka reveals that he eats cabbage and potatoes, not candy as you'd expect.
- Definitely a dealer who's careful not to get high off his own supply.
- If you remember from the very start of the book, cabbage and potatoes are the only food Charlie and his family can afford to eat. Here we get a direct correlation between Wonka and Charlie's family which suggests an underlying affinity despite outward differences in temper, energy and ostentation.
- It's yet another subverted expectation, which this book has no shortage of.
(7) "Charlie experienced a queer sense of danger. There was something dangerous about this whole business, and the Oompa-Loompas knew it."
- Wait, now he senses danger? The book's almost over.
- Seems to me, the whole thing became one big flashing red light of danger the moment Augustus Gloop fell into the chocolate river and got sucked into the factory pipes.
(8) Mike Teavee's parents worry about him being split into pieces from teleportation gone awry.
- Seems an awful lot like getting splinched in Harry Potter.
- I can understand Mike Teavee's television watching obsession as a primary character motivation, but I don't know if that necessarily translates to literal transmission through the airwaves. It's not as one-to-one as Augustus Gloop's need to eat or Violet Beauregarde's need to chew gum or Veruca Salt's need to get everything she desires.
(9) The Oompa-Loompa's song about Mike Teavee is double-length.
- The first half is the usual dark mockery, but the second half almost seems like an anti-television/pro-reading propaganda piece or campaign ad.
- You could easily replace TV with smart phones and convey exactly the same sentiment to modern audiences. Though, I guess it's basically the same idea. The main difference being that you can't just decide to watch TV in the middle of a conversation. TV watching is a more focused activity whereas smart devices are more intermittent.
(10) This edition ends with sample sections from Matilda, which I'll just skip since I already plan to read it sometime down the line.
(11) Ultimately, I feel around the same way about this as I did with the first Harry Potter book: it's wildly imaginative, clever, and close to a 5-star read for most of it, but ends pretty flat and a bit of a letdown.
- I actually see a whole lot of J.K. Rowling in Dahl, who I can only guess was a major influence on her work.
- Still, a great story and an unequivocal recommendation. For me, it just finished a bit too conventionally "happily ever after," whereas the book had been hitherto wildly unconventional, mischievous and sardonic.
