Aunque no lo he disfrutado tanto como la primera vez que lo leí (hay autores que, cuanto menos sepas de su vida, más disfrutas de su obra, especialmente la autobiográfica), me sigue pareciendo una lectura deliciosa, y que demuestra por qué Dahl tuvo tanto éxito escribiendo literatura infantil: recordaba muy bien cómo se ve el mundo y a los adultos cuando eres niño. Y lo cuenta en consecuencia, haciéndote sentir como en una aventura increíble.

Second time I've read this evocative and beautifully written memoir. Really enjoy his down-to-earth writing style.

He conveys simply and economically the brutal and unfair English public school system including fagging. A system devised to educate brutal bullies to run the British Empire.

This second version I've just read is not illustrated by Quentin Blake but is a charming edition with several old photos of letters, people (especially family) and sketches.

Some quotes...

Sweets

Sherbet Suckers were also two a penny. Each consisted of a yellow cardboard tube filled with sherbet powder, and there was a hollow liquorice straw sticking out of it. ...
You sucked the sherbet up through the straw and when it was finished you ate the liquorice. They were delicious, those Sherbet Suckers. The sherbet fizzed in your mouth, and if you knew how to do it, you could make white froth come out of your nostrils and pretend you were throwing a fit.

Gobstoppers, costing a penny each, were enormous hard round balls the size of small tomatoes. One Gobstopper would provide about an hour's worth of non-stop sucking
and if you took it out of your mouth and inspected it every
five minutes or so, you would find it had changed colour. There was something fascinating about the way it went from pink to blue to green to yellow. We used to wonder how in the world the Gobstopper Factory managed to achieve this magic. 'How does it happen?' we would ask each other. 'How can they make it keep changing colour?"

About being a writer

I began to realize how simple life could be if one had a regular routine to follow with fixed hours and a fixed salary and very little original thinking to do. The life of a writer is absolute hell compared with the life of a businessman. The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn't go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him. If he is a writer of fiction he lives in a world of fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not. Two hours of writing fiction leaves this particular writer absolutely drained. For those two hours he has been miles away, he has been
somewhere else, in a different place with totally different people, and the effort of swimming back into normal surroundings is very great. It is almost a shock. The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith, hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compen- sation is absolute freedom. He has no master except own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it.

....

كواليس رولد دال
https://www.ultrasawt.com/%D9%83%D9%8...

Before this year, I'd never read any of Dahl's work, and when I picked this up I didn't realize that it was an autobiography. So imagine my surprise when I crack the book open and see nothing at all whimsical or silly. Which is cool, but just not what I expected. Not reading the description strikes again!

Anyway, this is a nice collection of stories from Dahl's childhood and while I think that maybe a bit is embellished (who can remember that much detail from early childhood?), I enjoyed it quite a lot. I especially liked his family, and how awesome his mother was. She was definitely a strong and committed woman to do what she did for her family.

I definitely saw some influence on his stories here, which isn't surprising but was fun because it's like watching the building blocks of the creative process being put into place. I'll look for the second book in this series if I can find it because I'd love to get to where he was actually a working writer and read more about that. Dahl comments briefly here about it, but only to contrast a more structured and "normal" job with fixing oneself to write and be creative. Interesting stuff.

Also, I'm very glad that I never had to be an outhouse toilet-seat warmer. O_o

Meh... I really wanted to know more about his time in the army.
I hate to admit that I was bored.
Yes, bored while reading a Roal Dahl book.
This one proves it's possible

A joy to read an autobiography that focuses on the important things in a life: childhood as experienced through the child’s eye.

An extremely overlooked part of any important person’s life, I love that Roald Dahl has forever kept his sights on the things that matter.

I love learning about how one has lived as a child because it explains so much about the adult who they become.

As a side note, it was interesting to learn that despite what is described as a very comfortable upbringing, many themes of Roald Dahl’s most famous stories circulate around children who grew up in relative material depravity. My guess is that Roald Dahl has experienced the world. And for this, I can’t wait to read the next saga of his autobiography - Going Solo.

3 ½ stars. I was sad and angry that so much punishment and cruelty was done to boys in the school system.

Roald went to a Welsh school for kindergarten. The teacher beat him with a cane. His mother then sent him to different English schools thinking they were the best schools in the world. But sadly, in every school he went to he was beaten with a cane either by teachers, headmasters, or boys with the title Boazer(Prefect). When Roald was a teen he was a star athlete. That usually would have made him a Boazer. But the administrators would not make him a Boazer since they knew he would not use a cane to beat younger boys. I think this was a horrible way of life in the schools back in the 1920s and 1930s. It was widespread. Many of the teachers and staff were cruel. Sometimes innocent boys were accused of things just to be able to punish them.

CAUTION - VIOLENT AND GRAPHIC CONTENT IN SPOILER:

To be caned, the boy had to pull his pants down. One Boazer was admired for his caning ability. He would hit the boy in the same spot repeatedly and often draw blood. The victim was required to stand with his pants down for several minutes while other boys would closely examine the caning bruises in minute detail. Of course his privates were also on display for all to examine.


There were other stories that were interesting and did not make me as mad as the above.

This is nonfiction - 25 short essays about events in the author’s life from age 6 to age 20.

DATA:
Narrative mode: 1st person. Story length: 172 pages. Swearing language: none. Sexual content: none. Setting: mostly 1920s and 1930s Wales & England. Copyright: 1984. Genre: autobiography, memoirs.

I loved it. I loved Mr. Dahl's personal stories. It gave me a new perspective and understanding of him and his books. I would have loved to have met him over some tea. I think this would be a good book for older children (age 11+) to read. It gives great perspective on how differently children were treated some 80, 90 years, ago - especially children from a family of means. It also provides perspective on how adults appear to children. It's written with humor and sensitivity at the same time.

This (These) books surprised me like not many have ever before.
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#theguywiththebookreview presents Boy And Going Solo by Roald Dahl.
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I don't know how Roald Dahl did it! He made a childhood memoir from the early 20th century suitable for children to read.

Dahl may have grown up privileged but it doesn't mean he didn't suffer. "Boy" is mainly full of the horrible stories of pain that he had to endure throughout his younger years - beatings, surprise operations, loss and homesickness. But, somehow, he has made it light and almost fictional. If I was reading this as a child I probably would have found some of it funny, without the understanding that I have as an adult that these things were real and painful. Don't get me wrong, there are also some lovely memories there of family and, of course, various types of sweets (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory anyone?!)

A lot of the stories really display where he got ideas from for his later publications: terrifying headmasters, Oslo, his grandmother, lolly shops etc. As I was reading along I really enjoyed having little bits flick through my memory of his books and wonder if that was the inspiration. I'm super curious now about his time aboard and his time as a pilot. I might have to pick up the second installation "Going Solo" to find out more.

Siempre es interesante conocer lo qué hay detrás de nuestros escritores favoritos. En este caso, descubrimos lo qué hay detrás de Roald Dahl, y cómo sus historias de infancia moldearon los libros infantiles que más tarde escribiría.

I don't know if it was the book itself, my affinity towards Roald Dahl, or Dan Stevens' narration, but I absolutely adored this and, like listening to your grandfather's old stories, would most definitely listen to it again.