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Wordful Wednesday: James and the Giant Peach

Some books make tough read-alouds.  I’m not really sure why that’s the case, but it’s true.  Being a movie-quoter-voice-imitator-accent-annoyer type, I like to have nicely differentiated character voices, without being too over the top.  When everyone in a book is basically the same kind of character, that can be a bit tough.  For instance, I’ve had a hard time coming up with different characterizations for all the Hardy Boys’ friends.  Because they’re basically all the same age, ethnicity, etc.

So in that sense, James and the Giant Peach was a dream.  Because if you can’t come up with different voices for a bunch of giant bugs, you may as well hang it up.  A quick rundown of the voices I went with:

• Aunt Spiker – a quick, slightly masculine, crusty British.
• Aunt Sponge – think Hyacinth from Keeping Up Appearances.
• James – nondescript English boy.
• The Old Green Grasshopper – Albus Dumbledore, as portrayed by Richard Harris.
• The Centipede – Moss from The IT Crowd (nasal and nerdy sounding).
• The Earthworm – An inconsistent Northern English accent (kept slipping into Scottish, but not a bad job overall).  Something like Michael Palin from the “Tracts of Land” sketch in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
• Miss Spider – Irish.  I don’t know why.
• The Ladybug – Babs from Chicken Run.  “I don’t want to be a pie!  I don’t like gravy!” (pronounced “grehveh”)
• The Glowworm and the Silkworm – something inconsistent.  The characters didn’t appear often enough for me to remember what I did for either of them.

James and the Giant Peach is in the collection of books I had read to me in school, along with How to Eat Fried Worms and Where the Red Fern Grows (which I’m really looking forward to reading to the Pancake Eater).

As such, my memories of it were fairly fuzzy.  Wow, totally unintended Peach Pun there.  Anyhow, I loved everything about the book.  I loved the way Roald Dahl used language, love that he didn’t mind having both Evil Aunts crushed to death under the peach, and loved the way he described things.  I’m not even sure what was so great about his descriptions.  All I know is, when he talked about people taking bites of the Peach, it made me yearn for Summer.

(Cards on the table here:  Peaches are without question the greatest fruit in the world.  And if you can’t agree peach pie is superior in every way to apple pie, I’m not sure we should be friends.  Well, okay, we can be friends, but let’s just not discuss fruit.  Because you’re wrong, wrong, wrong!)

The peach descriptions affected the Pancake Eater the same way.  Which isn’t surprising, since he’s always been a peach-pounder himself.  (One of my favorite videos of him I titled “Singing While Eating,” and it can be viewed over on The Fair Elaine’s photo site.  The video is from seven years ago.  I feel old.)

I don’t expect to finish any more read-alouds with the Boy this year, leaving my total for Read-Alouds-That-Count at sixteen.  And we didn’t even read Narnia this year! 

Next up is probably Halley’s Bible Handbook, though there’s an outside chance I’ll finish something else.  And Halley’s should probably get a Theology Thursday Book Review, which doesn’t work for me right now since I’ve got two topics already lined up.  What shall I do?