I haven't read all of Roald Dahl's books, I need to. But of the ones I read when I was a kid: James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, and The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Mr. Fox was my favorite.

Also I liked Great Glass Elevator more than Chocolate Factory. The Great Glass Elevator is just so weird and strange with pills that make the grand parents lose age until the are minuses and the elevator going off in space.

And then I have a Children's Lit book from the class I took at college that has Roald Dahl's Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf poem.

She's seriously ill, damn it. She had a major heart attack that left her with very limited heart function, and she's not a good candidate for a transplant because of obesity. Grr.

Oh! I didn't know! That makes me very sad.

Anyone read Perdido Street Station and The Scar by China Mieville? I was just highly recommended them. (Well, the first vehemently, and the second she's just starting since it's the sequel.) Apparently it's genre-busting, and one of the genres it busts is steampunk, which I didn't even know existed (cyberpunk except...not...cyber).

I've read Perdido Street Station. Quite good. Kinda like what Big Fat Fantasy would be like if the seminal fantasy text was Gormenghast instead of Lord of the Rings. Inventively baroque is probably the best way to put it.

Kinda like what Big Fat Fantasy would be like if the seminal fantasy text was Gormenghast

Yeah, the Amazon blurb mentioned that too. I haven't read it.

Steampunk is ... huh, easy to point to, hard to describe. SF, fantasy, or alternate history where technology is more accelerated than it was in history; there's some cyberpunk cross-over, but they're not necessarily related. Contradicting that, one of the most famous steampunk work is The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, cyberpunk's most famous writer and most dedicated propagandist respectively, which is set in a 19th-century Britain undergoing an accelerated Industrial Revolution because Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace were able to come up with workable computers and computer languages. It's got many historical personages and characters from period novels wandering through.

Other significant works of steampunk are K.W. Jeter's Infernal Devices, most of Tim Powers' early work (esp. The Anubis Gates), some of James Blaylock's early work, and possibly Michael Swanwick's The Iron Dragon's Daughter, depending on how flexible you are in your definitions.

I hadn't heard Mieville's books put in quite that subgenre, but I can see the similiarities. Well, from what I've heard -- I've only read his first novel, King Rat, which is pretty much a straightforward urban horror/fantasy, if an unusually gritty one.

I like Danny the Champion of the World best of all of Dahl, I think, because it is the gentlest of his stories.

I always hope that if I ever have kids, I'll be like Danny's dad.

Has anyone here read any BALzac? (Sorry, I can't think his name without hearing The Music Man in my head.) I have an urge to read some of his stuff, but I have no idea which books are considered his best, or what the best translations are.

Has anyone here read any BALzac?

Didn't he write that...one...thing?

*Googles*

Uh, okay, I don't know what he wrote that's famous either, even though his name sounds familiar.

Has anyone here read any BALzac?

Balzac wrote dozens of novels. I've read Zola, which was good. Lots of family and social conflict. Poor father whose daughters married well think he embarrasses them, so when he comes to visit they hide him away and make him come in through the back door, that sort of thing.

The Great Brain books screwed me up, because they were the first place I saw the word "gentiles," so I thought non-Mormon was the general meaning. Oops.

That element of those books totally confused me. Even though my best friend was Mormon, I'd never heard it used in that sense before.

My favorite Roald Dahl was Matilda. This probably surprises exactly nobody. As for Judy Blume's kids books, I loved both Sally J. Friedman and Sheila.

I was actually just talking with a friend today about about A Little Princess. She loves the movie (the new one, not the Shirley Temple one) but hadn't known it had been a book. I liked Secret Garden better than Little Princess -- more magical elements, and the creepiness of the moors was just cool, and I could relate a lot more to Mary than to Sara. Sara always seemed just a little bit too goody-goody to me.