I picked this one up after seeing a review on GR and started it almost two months ago. It's a book of short stories and I would pick it up when I needed a quick break from work, current reading, chores, etc. So it taking me two months to read was not a sign of it being boring. All this and I probably had too many books going on at once.

This book contains stories that are quite different from some of the usual Dahl books. Some are pretty short and some are longer, with a total of seven stories. There is even a story of how Dahl got started writing. During my reading of this book, I picked up and read and small book on Dahl's life. Nice to get a big picture view of his life along with how he got his start writing. It's hard to pick one story that I liked best. Could be the story of the pick pocketer, the true story of the buried treasure, or that wonderful story of Henry Sugar. There was one story I didn't much care for due to the subject matter - the story of the swan. But that was just issues I have (touchy w/anything w/animals).

Overall, glad I read this one to get a different take on Dahl's writing.

Hay ciertos relatos dentro del libro que no me parecieron la gran cosa, ni muy buenos ni muy malos. Pero la verdad fueron la excepción entre una pluma tan máguca y esperanzadora. Aquellos relatos donde el autor puede extenderse un poco más logran conseguir ese sentimiento de asombro que mientras creces vas perdiendo.

I received this as a birthday present from my grandfather at some point in childhood. I haven't read it in more than forty years, and honestly I'm not sure if I ever read all of the stories in it, but I did read the title story several times. I'm "reviewing" now because I was just thinking with amusement of how Henry Sugar develops psychic abilities by spending hour after hour starting fixedly into the blue part of a candle flame, and my child self was like "sounds legit" (or whatever the 1980 equivalent of that phrase would have been). Each time I read it, I resolved that I too would spend hours staring at a candle, so as to develop psychic powers, but I never got around to it because it seemed like so much effort!

Well I enjoyed this collection of short stories much :) Especially the first two & the last two :)
The Boy who talked with Animals was just a great one & the Hitch Hiker was hilarious :D
The Wonderful story of Henry Sugar was indeed wonderful & the last one which was rather autobiographical was amazing :) Wish these stories wouldn't end..

The short story collection contains 7 stories:
The Boy Who Talked with Animals 4 stars
The Hitch-Hiker 3 stars
The Mildenhall Treasure 3 stars
The Swan 3 stars
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar 4 stars
Lucky Break 4 stars
A Piece of Cake 2 stars

There are several of these that I really enjoyed and the rest were well done. I love Henry Sugar and the method Henry goes about getting 'powers' after reading about a yogi. Concentration is a powerful thing. That was a well done story and I enjoyed the way it started. A super story.

I thought his auto-biographical piece on how Roald began his writing career was wondering and it tied into this autobiography as well with the fighter pilot. He basically walked right into his career. It was pre-ordained, pretty much. He has some great tips for writing as well and he goes into what his English Lit professor said about his writing, which made you realize they probably didn't know what they were talking about. They were just meanies.

The last one I really enjoyed was the Boy who could talk with animals. I loved the compassion in this story and the boy riding around on a turtle. It has that magic twist a Roald DAhl story can spin.

I think these 3 stories are the strongest.

The Swan is a good story, but it was stressful. It's about bullying and it doesn't have a happy ending in my opinion. This is obviously how he felt at school as a boy being bullied. I was driving home in traffic and this story was not good for that as it was so stressful and hard to read. It is painful, just painful in all ways. It's about human cruelty. It's good, but I won't read it again.

I thought the Hitchhiker and Mildenhall Treasure (which is non-fiction) were fun and cute. They didn't blow me away, but they rounded out the book nicely.

The last: Piece of Cake was filler. It was ok, but it did not hook me

I'm glad I was finally able to finish this up and I think that this finishes off all the books of Roald Dahl that are considered his children's books. I still need to read his adult works like Uncle Oswalt, but I'm mostly done with his stuff. It has been a pleasure.

This book is made up of multiple short stories by Roald Dahl.
- "The Boy Who Talked With Animals - in which a stranded sea turtle and a small boy have more in common than meets the eye.
- The Hitchhiker - proves that in a pinch a professional pickpocket can be the perfect pal.
- The Mildenhall Treasure - a true tale of fortune found and an opportunity lost.
- The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar - in which a modern-day Robin Hood brings joy to the hearts of orphans - and fear to the souls of casino owners around the world."

I did not enjoy The Boy Who Talked With Animals. I thought it was very slow, random and not entertaining. It took me a long time to get through this short story.

The Hitchhiker was very entertaining and actually scary. There was some violence that was very unexpected in this story and the whole story definitely kept me on my toes.

The Midenhall Treasure was a true story about treasure that was found and Roald Dahl got the opportunity to write about it for a magazine. It was interesting to read about all the laws of finding treasure in that country.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar did not have an interesting beginning to it's story. Henry read about Imhrat Khan, an Indian man with an amazing special talent. As Henry learns more about Khan he discovers that Khan's special powers is being able to see the world around him without using his eyes. Khan is able to do this because of training with a yogi. This story motivates Henry to learn how to do the same skill, so he can become a great gambler and be able to read cards. After this part is when I started to enjoy Henry Sugar's story more. Henry became a wealthy man from gambling, so he wanted to do something great with the money, so he opens many orphanages.

The ending of the book is Dahl talking about his childhood and growing up experience. As much as I enjoyed reading about it, I was disappointed because it was so similar to the book Boy: Tales of Childhood by Roald Dahl. There was a ton of overlapping stories and there were stories that was in this book but not his autobiography. That bugged me. It should have been in his autobiography if he wanted to share it. It was a weird ending to the whole book, having it be an autobiography of random stories of his childhood.

This was not one of my favorite Roald Dahl books, but I am glad that I read it and experienced it.

İçerisinde sekiz keyifli öykünün olduğu, adını da kitabın en uzun, kurmacanın doruklarında olan Şeker Henry’nin İnanılmaz Öyküsü’nden alan muzip bir Dahl kitabı. Fonetiği çok tatlı olduğundan kitabın adı da şeker gibi olmuş ama etkilendiğim hatta tek etkilendiğim öykü Kuğu’ydu. Derinliği, edebi lezzeti ile ve kesinlikle seyirlik bir öykü Kuğu.
Hoş bir dinlenme kitabı. Dahl okumakla beraber izlemesi de keyifli yazarlardan biri olabilir. Sinematografik bulduğum Kuğu öyküsü ile Laura Wandel’in Playground filmi birbirine selam veren eserlerden bence.
Ayrıca Dahl’ın Matilda’sı en sevdiğim kitaplarından.

I recently read The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More by Roald Dahl, which tells short stories on a greedy man who changes his lifestyle. In my opinion, Roald Dahl is one of the best authors since he can turn fantasy and unbelievable novels into novels that seem realistic, but still unbelievable. Because of this sense, reading this book has been a wondrous adventure that I couldn't have gotten from other authors. The story of Henry Sugar reminded me a lot of a movie made in 2016 called, "Doctor Strange". The journeys between both books are very similar, although every plot follows the Hero's Journey, as mentioned in A Hero of A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. Both of these characters follow a yoga path, which is the style of magic and concentrating the inner and outer mind. These characters intentionally try to use the power for personal gain but eventually uses it to help others. One moment in this book that really ties the whole plot together was Henry Sugar's moment of realization. Usually, in fantasy books, you rarely find anything that has to do with thinking or concentrating. Henry Sugar had a thought, after 3 years of the path of yoga, to help others such as an orphanage. This seemed pretty realistic, like how Steve Jobs created the iPod because he thought of his daughter and her cassette. Overall, I enjoyed this book with its realistically not realistic theme.

Mình đọc cuốn này lâu dễ sợ, đến hàng tháng trời

Collection of 6 of Roald Dahl's stories, including three non-fiction works. Unsurprisingly, his non-fiction isn't as amazing as his fiction, but it's still pretty excellent. One of the non-fiction pieces is the story of how he became a writer, and Dahl says in it that he doesn't really like to write non-fiction because what he loves about writing is inventing stories. It reminds me of an Elie Wiesel quote that I love (and once considered getting as a tattoo): "God created Man because he loves stories."
Anyway, I love the story of how Dahl became a writer, because he makes it sound so ridiculously haphazard. He wrote up an experience for another writer to turn into a story, and that writer felt Dahl's version was already a story so he got his agent to sell it as is. This collection also includes that story, Dahl's first published work, and it reads just like what it is, as though he sat down to record a list of the things he remembered and got throughly carried away. It's fun to read those two stories in a row like that.
The other pieces in the collection are typical Roald Dahl fantasy, bizarre and charming. Even the third non-fiction piece reads like his fiction; it may have really happened, but if it hadn't, Dahl would probably have thought of it himself eventually.

Yesterday was bright and windy and sunny and I went to Park Slope to meet up with Danny and then Kevin turned up and I hadn't seen either of them in a long time and we all love each other SO DEARLY so there was a lot of grinning and hugs and they are so funny and kind and good, and then Kevin had to go so Danny and I sat in the green cool grass in the park and watched dogs and a beetle crawled on me and then Danny had to go so I went to the comic book store and then it was almost time for Andrew to get off work so I waited for him and we ate gelato on a bench and then I went into the city and met up with Ray and Adem, and Erik was there, and the other, handsomer, nicer Andrew, and the other, weirder, crazier Kevin, and I smoked two cigarettes and came home to Michael and the cats and ate ice cream and toast for dinner and finished this book and it was perfect, this book is perfect, it was a perfect day.

Le doy 2,5 porque realmente me ha decepcionado mucho-mucho. Hay varias historias zafias y que me han resultado hasta desagradables. Creo que el Roald Dahl adulto no me va a gustar tanto como el infantil, porque esa "crueldad" de sus historias para niños es demasiado cruda en su versión para mayores...