I introduced my four and a half year old daughter to The Twits by Roald Dahl last week. I wasn’t sure if she would be mature enough to appreciate it yet, but she is a smart girl and she was becoming bored with her ‘younger’ books, so I thought I’d give it a try.
We read it in three settings and, when we’d finished, she wanted to read it again immediately. Few parenting moments have delighted me more than her positive reaction to it. We have a Roald Dahl classics collection, however, so rather than go over The Twits again, I suggested we read The Fantastic Mr Fox (which I had never read as a child). We got about halfway through before Chloe asked me to read The Twits again instead. She claimed it was because the farmers in Mr Fox were too scary, but I suspect she just grew bored – it doesn't have the same devilish humour. We’re now making a second pass on The Twits at bedtime, a couple of chapters each night.
This experience got me thinking again about the books that mattered to me as a child. There are many reasons Chloe’s enthusiasm for The Twits delighted me, but chief among them is that good fiction still has the power to enthral, even in the online age. Chloe loves her iPad and will happily watch stuff on it for hours at a time (the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, I guess*), but that has done nothing to diminish her interest in books. Written storytelling can, to put it in rather commercial terms, still compete for attention.
* She's obsessed with the 1960s animated series of Spider-Man at the moment and she also enjoyed Danger Mouse. Thank you YouTube.