Matilda

Matilda is a genius. It takes more than four years for anyone to notice it but she is. She teaches herself to read and understand math. She can reason and plot, and well before she turns five and a half she is outthinking her parents, though it couldn’t have been all that difficult. Once she enters school, she meets Ms. Honey, a lovely young teacher who sees the child’s potential, and eventually they become friends. They rescue each other, in fact, and are left to their own happily-ever-afters (don’t take that summary as an excuse not to read it. That’s like not watching Jurassic Park because you know it’s about dinosaurs).

Rather than tell you more about Matilda, when you really should just read it, I’ll tell you a memory about why I feel so drawn to this story.

My family would go to the library every other week or so for a fresh batch of books (my mother is a book fiend and an elementary school teacher—it’s a wonder I wasn’t born with printer’s ink in my veins). I would arrive with my arms full of returns and I would leave better burdened with new titles, all kinds. Eventually, it seemed I had read everything I could reach and I was still hungry for new books. So one day, I crossed the line; I snuck into the grown-ups’ part of the library, a vast ocean compared to the kiddie pool brimming with Dr. Suess and pastel Young Adult fiction.
I have no idea what compelled me to it but I ended up standing in front of Shakespeare. Hardcover and paperback. Fake-leather-bound and some with shiny, crinkly plastic slipped over their dust-jackets like candy wrappers. I picked out Romeo and Juliet. A librarian came along just then and asked me if I needed anything. I said I was looking for my mother, hugged the book so she couldn’t take it and ran back to the front of the library to wait. I must have only understood half of what I read over the next few days but I couldn’t get over the beauty of the words. I rolled them over and over in my mind, speaking them aloud until they clicked in place, and I knew that I was reading something amazing. Small things can change your life forever; that day changed mine. Shakespeare fan, diehard romantic, and devoted logophile in one fell swoop. A bit older than I am in that photograph, I was about seven.

Matilda’s story is sad and sweet without being saccharine and boring. She’s feisty and smart, not just intelligent, and she’s tough. Mrs. Trunchbull, the headmistress, is a prime villain. It really is a shame that she’s not listed along with the Evil Stepmother and Maleficent and all the other epic bad guys from children’s books and movies. Beyond all of my personal reasons for liking it, Matilda is excellent. It should have been required reading in the “alienate the smart-kids” class that I was sent to once a week starting in third or fourth grade. It would have made me feel more awesome than awkward, although it might have also had me staring at the glasses at the dinner table, convinced I was telekinetic (but then, what young nerd doesn’t want superpowers?). I’m going to buy a copy, keep it around and the next time I see a kid under the age of five reading the newspaper, I’ll give them this to read as well.

The fact that it's taken me so long to find Matilda astounds me. It seems that this book should have lifted itself off the shelves and thrown itself at me or that I should have struck straight at it like a match going off. It opens with Dahl telling us about parents’ insistence that their children, regardless of the truth of it, are brilliant. Most people want to think that they and/or their children are geniuses (in one poll I recently came across, around forty percent of American responders think they’re in that one-in-a-thousand club). It’s easy to follow that to the next page and think, while reading, that you are just like Matilda! I wish I could say I was spared this reaction, I might even be a little embarrassed but, I’m not.


Results:
Title: Matilda
Author: Roald Dahl
Page Count: 233, including many illustrations
Time: An hour and ten minutes, including an incredible headache migraine... Let's just call it what it is.

Sunday: TBA possibly The Skies of Pern or Berlinski's short history of mathematics.