Character Connection is a meme hosted by the introverted reader, and I couldn't really find any new ones, so I don't know if it's still going. But I like the idea of celebrating characters you like, so here we go. Also I really like Matilda, so I'm going to go for it.
Title: Matilda
Author: Roald
Dahl
Year: 1988
Language:
English
Publisher:
Jonathan Cape
Illustrations: Quentin Blake
When I was
a kid I read a lot of Roald Dahl. My parents have a lot of books and there are
a lot of Roald Dahl books for some reason, probably because he’s a friggin’
genius. I never read the Witches, but I had the Witches read to me, and now I
can never read it, because when I was 6-7 years old my imagination was sort of
crazy and I completely and seriously believed in witches. For years I slept
with my blanket over my head so the witches couldn’t get me. Yeah, I was a
weird kid. My favourite book though, when I was a little kid, was Matilda. I
have read it a bazillion times. It’s been a while now, and I feel like I should
read it again, in English. I read it in Norwegian when I was a kid.
Matilda is
a book about a young girl who is wildly intelligent, but lives with dim-witted
and cruel parents. They view her as stupid and annoying. Matilda spends her
time going to the library, and eventually she starts going to school. She
becomes close with her teacher Miss Honey and is horrified to see the principal
Miss Trunchbull physically punishing children. Matilda soon discovers she has
telekinetic powers by pushing a glass containing a newt over. Matilda discovers
that Miss Honey had to live with her aunt, Miss Trunchbull, when she was a
child, after the mysterious death of her father Magnus. Matilda devices a plan
to get rid of Miss Trunchbull and puts her telekinesis to good use. It’s
amazing.
Matilda is
such a badass. She is from a family where no one loves her and she is the only
one who actually has some sort of intellect. Matilda is really clever, and she
starts reading when she’s a little kid and she loves going to the library. She
gets a library card and she reads her way through to the children’s section and
then goes through the rest of the books. She is just so cool.
I think I
identified with Matilda. By which I am not saying I’m as intelligent as her,
but I was a bit of a smart-ass, might still be. I have always been bookish, I
love reading, I love libraries. Luckily my parents love me and made sure I went
to school and that my teachers didn’t physically hurt me, also my dad didn’t
scam people. I’m going off topic. I think I related to Matilda because I was
awkward and sort of odd, and she liked reading and she stood up to people who
were horrible to her or her friends. I think that’s quite admirable when you’re
that small and you just tell an authority figure to fuck off and be nice to you
and stop being mean to people. I liked her so much when I was growing up.
Matilda is
strong, she’s tough, she’s smart and she stands up for the weak and I sort of
aspired to be her as a kid and I think we should all aspire to be more like her.
That’s pretentious. She is sort of awesome though. I should really reread this
book. Yes, the moral of this is that Matilda is a serious badass, she is tough, strong and I should really reread the books of my youth, except Pippi, or the Witches.
Title: Matilda