When I was a kid, I loved Roald Dahl’s books. But I haven’t read them in years. Do kids still enjoy them? I hope so, and I hope it’s not just adults looking to recreate their childhoods. I find Dahl’s work so timeless and yet bizarre, really. Anyway, Dahl’s estate is working with Taika Waititi to raise some money during the lockdown. Taika enlisted all of his big cool celebrity friends for a read-along of James and the Giant Peach. The book will be read across ten episodes posted Monday-Wednesday-Friday for the next few weeks, and episodes have already been put on YouTube. The read-along is raising money for Partners in Health to benefit coronavirus relief. Dahl’s daughter Ophelia works for Partners In Health.
Taika apparently roped in all kinds of celebrities, including Chris Hemsworth, Liam Hemsworth, Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, Ryan Reynolds, Lupita Nyong’o, Sarah Paulson, Benedict Cumberbatch and Billy Porter. People sent me one of the videos with Benedict Cumberbatch and OMG, I might have to dust off my Cumbercrush? Bendy is looking like a bearded SNACK. He’s grown out a quarantine beard and his hair is longish and curly (Cumbercurls, remember them??) and he even wears reading glasses at one point. This is all so attractive to me. Here’s a video:
Granted, I only zipped through part of this to see Bendy, but it looks very cute and if I had kids, I would totally encourage them to watch all the videos and enjoy Dahl’s work. And yeah… a bearded snack. I love how gingery his beard is. Bendy has two little boys at home now, Kit and Hal. I wonder if he’s the one reading to them at night. I bet he is. You can see the videos here on YouTube.
Photos courtesy of YouTube.
Haha! that last pic definitely has some otter going on! Love it (and him)!
Fine, but focusing on his beard is ignoring the real escandalo here. Which is that he organizes his bookshelf by colour?????????????????
That was the first thing I noticed. I hate it when foo-foo interior designers do that. Books should be in groupings that make sense to find what you’re looking for. Cookbooks together. Novels together. Hobbies together. The only books that should be grouped by color are encyclopedias or journals that happen to have the same binding.
Right? Why have the books if you’re clearly not using them? Just get some posters or artwork or something if the space needs colour. The worst though is when they turn the books so the pages are facing out and the spines are towards the wall. Have you seen that? Atrocious.
Isn’t Sophie a designer?
Yep, it’s horrible. I tried it once and had to undo immediately.
I used to follow him more closely and always got the sense that he was a constant reader, so maybe this is just a decoration room he’s using for Zooms and the real books are elsewhere.
I’ve always thought that people who do that don’t really read.
Aghhhhhh…Books by color? Blasphemy!
Uhhhhhhhh
I think it’s a rental as apparently he was filming in NZ when the lockdown started so the word around town is that he’s been staying in NZ for the past few months
LOL. I organized my books by color after they were categorized. It is so much less visually stressful for me. One bookcase is cookbooks and the other short bookcase is reference and fiction. I declutter/clean often, though, so I know where every single book is.
I will admit that I have donated so many books before multiple moves that it takes me 2 seconds to grab something and the color matching makes it even easier to put it back away.
Yeah the Bendy crush is slightly reignited with these pics.
Yes! I do like Taika’s hair longer though. The mad salt and pepper curls are gorgeous
My kids have only ever read when they had to lol. Except for my middle kid who started reading very early, read all the classics, old and new, and by the 5th grade rebelled by reading adult novels because I still bitched about rated R movies lol. So he went into puberty scarily prepared lol. My husband, however, loves old classics and has always read to the boys and pushed authors such as Dahl. And the great thing after reading certain classics is they can then enjoy interpretations on film.
Bendy looks so delish😋😍
I love Roald Dahl so much. For a long time Costco carried box sets of a few different classic kids authors and I got the Roald Dahl one for one of my nephews and my niece (separate families so it was one set per family) as soon as they were old enough to read chapter books.
I don’t know if they love them as much as I did but the stories really do still hold up even now.