Roald Dahl's Childhood Autobiography

Maybe it is because I am a grown-up, or maybe it is because I was never a 9 year old boy, but I was not particularly fond of this story. I read it as part of a graduate course book club. Although I think it is really cool that Roald Dahl actually wrote an autobiography about his childhood, many of the stories were mildly disgusting/gruesome.

I'm not sure which bothered me more, the story about the time he almost had his nose cut off in a car accident, or the story about how he watched as a doctor cut a large boil off of a little boy. Perhaps I am bias because I was trying to eat my lunch while I read about the latter of these incidents, and it completely ruined my appetite.

These things aside, this book does have a very distinct voice, and has a very comfortable rhythm to the words. It also taught me about what all boy British prep schools were like during the early-twentieth century. They were not fun places! Full of words like "fagging", "bog", and "nib", this book is sure to teach readers about a type of life that they cannot rightly imagine without Dahl's colorful descriptions.