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Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

We need to remember that childrens books are mostly not bought by children, but by adults for children.

Dahl is often in the "most read" lists, because adults keep buying the books. But when we ask children what books they love he stops appearing. (Sadly, this info is buried in old reports from "What kids are reading", which is hard to find now). https://web.archive.org/web/20140603135101/http://whatkidsar...

If your child enjoys reading Dahl that's great, keep buying them. But there are so many books that are just better than Dahl and that don't come with all the baggage.

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>If your child enjoys reading Dahl that's great, keep buying them. But there are so many books that are just better than Dahl and that don't come with all the baggage.

I agree there's a lot of baggage, but I'm interested in what books you think are "just better"?

Anything in the Carnegie Medal short lists (and probably the long list too). For younger children anything in the Greenaway short lists.

My dislike for this class of censorship where we try and remove the works of authors for views they held and thoughts expressed working to make a society where we remove everything that makes us slightly uncomfortable in a manner that would make Captain Beatty proud, aside.

I was unable to find neither the 1019 or 2018 report but I did find the 2017 report. https://doc.renlearn.com/KMNet/R60818.pdf

Year 2 - Girls: The Magic Finger, Rank 9 up from 17.

Year 3 -

Overall: The Magic Finger, Rank 2 same as previous year.

Overall: Fantastic Mr Fox, Rank 5 up from 6

Overall: George’s Marvellous Medicine, Rank 7 up from 9

Overall: Esio Trot, Rank 20 up from 37

Year 4 -

Overall: The Twits, Rank 1 same as previous year.

Overall: George’s Marvellous Medicine , Rank 1 up from 4

Overall: Fantastic Mr Fox, Rank 1 same

Overall: The Magic Finger, Rank 4 down from 2

Overall: Esio Trot, Rank 5 same

There are more listed, I don't have time to go through the entire thing but the reports seem to show that kids LOVE his works...or they did 3 years ago.

Thank you for finding that report.

Please actually read it. It supports what I say: Children read Dahl because other people buy the books for them to read. So he always appears in "most read" lists. Children do not enjoy the books, which is why when you ask children what books they enjoy he doesn't appear in those lists.

The report you've linked contains both types of lists. For "most liked" you need pages 26-28, and appendix H tables 34 to 42b. Dahl doesn't appear once in the "most liked" tables. That's striking because he is so heavily read - he appears in all the "most often read" tables.

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