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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2655 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 16, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I recently asked ChatGPT what the most recent global children's literature phenomenon before Harry Potter was. Surely someone must've written something since the Narnia books. It confidently said Matilda and refused to budge even when I told him I had no fucking clue who Matilda was.

Anyway, this Friday I found myself on a long bus trip with only a phone to keep me company and I decided to see what it was all about. And, oh boy, was I not impressed. Is everything by Roald Dahl as bad as Matilda? I wouldn't read this trash to my child if you paid me. The last book I inadvertently read that was equally terrible was The Girl that Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson.

Dahl's books struggle a lot with the limits of their medium, if you're looking for deep moral lessons. Matilda is supposed to have protected a bunch of fellow students from the Trenchbull, but there's good reason that most adaptations leave her with her powers and a general 'will try to help' personality at the end. The Witches and Big Friendly Giant are slightly better, albeit at the cost of being uncomfortable readers for adults.

I'll second erwgv3g34's list:

  • Goosebumps is a long series of mostly unconnected horror novellas released under the name 'R.L. Stine'. They're usually don't end well for the protagonist, tend to lean into gross horror, and are pretty highly varied in quality, but they were really popular with kids in the 8-12 year old range.
  • Animorphs is a single series of scifi books by K. A. Applegate, featuring a small group of teenagers who stumble upon an alien conspiracy to take over the earth and have to fight it using a different alien's tech that gave them magical shapeshifting. It's like Power Rangers, but except where Power Rangers has teenagers with attitude beating up monsters of the week with giant mechs, switch out 'attitude' for variants of shellshock, 'monsters of the week' with family or friends getting taken over by brainworms, and 'giant mechs' with Rachel turning into a bear. Good, but gets very dark. ('Here I go committing mass murder again!') Can be harder reads, though: advanced kids might be able to get them in the 10+ age range, but especially the later or large books would be difficult before 14 for most kids.
  • Redwall is a set of anthropomorphic novels set in a medieval fantasy world with a very clear division between good ('goodbeasts') and evil ('vermin') with very few exceptions. (imo, the weakest part of the series is its manicheanism). Most of the books are independent or only solely tied to each other (Martin the Warrior is a prequel to Mossflower, Mattimeo a sequel to Redwall), but they share the same world and individual locations or roles show up repeatedly. Longer stories, but relatively easy reads: ability to focus tends to be more important than vocabulary.

That said, I'll caveat that they're older works: Redwall and Animorphs were very much 90s-00s phenomena, and while Goosebumps is still in print it's not nearly as high-ranking as before. Goosebumps is also generally not a very moral work. From that era, I'd also add in Diane Duane's Young Wizards series (hidden world where select few can learn magic and must confront the Power of Entropy / Satan, heavily drenched in Christian religious theodicy), Dianna Wynne Jones Howl's Moving Castle and Dark Lord of Derkholme, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. Terry Pratchett's entire output: Good Omens is the best-known because of the tv show and a joint work, and his last couple books went downhill, but I'd still give both The Witches and The Watch sides of the Discworld series as a good set of moral lessons. The Golden Compass is... worth being aware of, but messy: it's an aggressively anti-theist work by a bit of a prick and the denouement is trash, but it was very-well-known.

For recent phenomenon, your pickings are more mixed. A lot of stuff that's popular is just cruft: Captain Underpants was popular enough to get a movie, but I would consider it too simple for most 8-year-old readers. Dog Man is a little more advanced, but not much, and Percy Jackson is just a bastard child of Harry Potter and the paranormal detective world. There was a giant movement of Hunger Games-like slop in the late 2010s, and while they weren't necessarily all bad, none of them were really worth writing home about.

That said, I will point to the Erin Hunter group as somewhat interesting:

  • Warrior Cats follows a set of 'tribes' of feral cats trying to survive in a world with very weak magic. These get very dark (a named character getting crushed by a car isn't even the bloodiest death of one single book), but they're also very strongly moral books.
  • Wings of Fire is pretty similar but with dragons instead.

They're nothing terribly complicated, but they're decently written and have interesting takes.

I am an Astrid Lindgren fanboy, though that is a bit old fashioned/retro cool.

Roald Dahl is awesome and holds a deservedly esteemed place in the canon of British children's literature. I distinctly recall that one of the blurbs on my edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone observed that "comparisons to Dahl are, for once, justified" — on this side of the pond, comparing a children's writer to Dahl is like comparing a model of car to a Rolls-Royce. I'd hazard a guess that just about every British or Irish Millennial (or older) would have at least a passing familiarity with a few of Dahl's works and their iconic illustrations by Quentin Blake: these books are a true generational monocultural touchstone. I heartily recommend The Twits (my first encounter with the concepts of body positivity and gaslighting — no really), James and the Giant Peach, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Danny, the Champion of the World, The BFG and The Witches. (And, yes, I do think Matilda is great, and marginally superior to its transplanted American film adaptation, which I think holds up remarkably well.)

Interestingly, in addition to his career as a children's novelist, he also wrote delightfully wicked and macabre short stories for adults, many of which were published in outlets like Playboy and/or adapted as episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. One of these, "The Great Automatic Grammatizator", is alarmingly prescient in addition to being a cracking read.

I guess they just don't have enough penetration into the non-Anglo world, other than the chocolate factory one (and I would blame Gene Wilders and memes for that).

I'm genuinely surprised. Danny DeVito adapted Matilda for film, Henry Selick (of The Nightmare Before Christmas fame) adapted James and the Giant Peach, Wes Anderson directed multiple Dahl adaptations including Fantastic Mr. Fox, and no less than Steven Spielberg directed the most recent adaptation of The BFG. Just these four films made an inflation-adjusted 505 million dollars between them, and they're far from an exhaustive catalogue of all the various adaptations of Dahl's works. I appreciate that Dahl isn't as widely known in the states as in the UK and Ireland, but I assumed that the average Millennial or pre-Millennial American would be familiar with at least one of his non-Chocolate Factory works or its cinematic adaptation. The man was far from a one-hit-wonder.

I meant Anglo as in the core Anglosphere. You know, Five Eyes (and Ireland?).

American

I think you're talking to a Russian.

Ah. I thought by "non-Anglo" he meant "non-English" as opposed to "non-Anglosphere". Makes sense.

Dahl’s stuff is popular with 10 year old kids because it’s irreverent of the pieties of adulthood (though fifty years out of date now). The fact that you wouldn’t read it to your child is part of the appeal.

I guess I just didn't like the book for the same reason I don't like Home Alone. Maybe it's okay to punish caricatures of pure evil in a book for children, but neither Kevin nor Matilda are making the world a better place by inflicting cruel and unusual punishments.

I can see that, and would probably agree with you if I had read any of his books after age 12 or so. I think that if you are mature enough to consider the morality involved, or its sociological implications, you are too old for the books. Dahl was so successful because he had the mind of a kid, and he famously didn't get on with adults.

Goosebumps? Animorphs? Redwall?

What are these?

Series (plural) of children's books that achieved popularity significant but much lower than Harry Potter's. Redwall even got an official video game shortly after the author's death.

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