The Summer Nostalgia Reads series challenges library staff to return to beloved childhood favorites to see how they hold up years later. Some stories are just as magical as we remember, while others inspire new perspectives that only come with age. Join us as we relive our literary youths and find out just how much we've changed.
A New School, a New Teacher, and a New Love of Books
I was in first grade in 1980. Jimmy Carter was president. It was one of the hottest summers on record, and George Brett batted .400 in September. These are the first current events I remember. There was a lot going on, and I was waking up to a whole world doing its thing without checking with me first.
My family moved across town that summer and I started at a new school in the fall. My mom took me and my sister up to see it a few days before the first day. It was closed, so we walked around the outside and read the names of our teachers and classmates on lists taped up inside the windows. My teacher’s name was Mr. Kelly.
I was bewildered and kept my mouth shut, but Mr. Kelly eventually drew me so far out of my shell he may have regretted it. “Dan is learning when his sense of humor is appropriate, as we have discussed,” he informed my parents in a handwritten note on the last report card of the school year, which my mom saved.
Mr. Kelly wore glasses and a righteous 1970s mustache, laughed and spoke loudly, but I never saw him lose his temper. He knew his business, part of which was reading books aloud to us at a regular time each day. The first of these was James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl.
James and the Giant Peach (Mr. Kelly's Version)
Simply put, I didn’t know what hit me. When I imagine what I must have looked like sitting in that classroom, I see a boy with huge eyes and a mouth agape with pure wonder. The pairing of Roald Dahl and Mr. Kelly was unlike anything I had ever experienced. Dahl’s tale was filled with one strange occurrence after another, menacing characters who got their comeuppances, and scary ones who turned out to be nice. Mr. Kelly used different voices for some, including a villainous falsetto for James’ evil aunts, Ms. Spiker and Ms. Sponge.
My mind was blown. In the years since, I’ve read a lot of books, seen a lot of movies and shows, listened to a lot of music, and travelled a bit, but I still rank Mr. Kelly’s reading of James and the Giant Peach to his first-grade class at Don Bonjour Elementary School in the fall of 1980 as one of the greatest aesthetic experiences of my life. And it showed me where to find more of that feeling, in the book he held in his hands. Down the hall was a whole school library full of them, and many more to be found beyond the school doors. I can draw a straight line from that moment to where I sit now, heading into my fourth decade working in public libraries.
So when I picked up James and the Giant Peach to reread for our Summer Nostalgia Reads series, I was excited, but also nervous. How could it possibly live up to my first experience? I checked that expectation at the door. Instead, it felt like a good time to look at how much has changed in the world of reading since 1980.
James and the Giant Peach (Libby's Version)
This time around, instead of Mr. Kelly, I used my phone and a pair of cheap earbuds to listen to a streaming audio version of the book on our digital reading platform, Libby. A famous British actor named Julian Rhind-Tutt, opens a new window read it to me while I walked my dog, and the production’s sound effects are so good I stopped and looked for sea gulls on Louisiana St. The library has this audio version on CD, as well, and when it becomes available as a Wonderbook — a newish format consisting of a print book with an attached digital gadget that plays a full recording — we will get that, too. Back in 1980, there may have been an audio version of James and the Giant Peach available on cassette or vinyl somewhere, but I had never seen such a thing.
My parents gave me a copy of the book for Christmas that year, and it was the first hardcover chapter book I ever owned. I still remember the novelty of holding a book with a loose jacket as I pored over the dreamy illustrations by Nancy Ekholm Burkert. These days, that first American edition is out of print. Quentin Blake’s whimsical line drawings have become an important part of Roald Dahl’s branding and accompany each of his titles. The library has several print copies of this version of James and the Giant Peach available for checkout, but we also make it available as an ebook on Libby for those who wish to read it on a digital device. In the past 12 months, our print copies have checked out a total of 17 times, compared to the ebook’s 26.
When I was six, I would have loved to watch a movie version of James and the Giant Peach at the old Ranch Mart Theater, but Roald Dahl prevented any from being made during his lifetime (he died in 1990). In 1996, stop-motion animation wiz Henry Selick, of Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline fame, directed a feature-length, animated adaptation of the novel, complete with Oscar-nominated songs by Randy Newman, and the voice work of Susan Sarandon, Simon Callow, and others. Today, one can check it out on DVD from the library or get it rolling on a streaming service within 30 seconds.
All this to point out how many more ways there are to consume stories now, and how much culture has accumulated around this one (I didn't even mention the musical and play). The tale itself remains the same: the unhappy boy, the mean aunts, the weird magic green things he spills at the base of a peach tree, the resulting giant peach, and talking critters inside it. It’s every bit as great as Lewis Carroll’s Alice and L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, influences to which Dahl owes a debt, I now see, but upon which he also builds.
Audiobook narrator Rhind-Tutt does voices, too; many more, in fact, than Mr. Kelly. Shifting my mind’s eye from the wide-eyed, slack-jawed, first grader I was in his classroom, I notice Mr. Kelly wasn’t exactly ready to tread the boards at the Old Vic. He was just a guy in brown corduroy trying to get through a day so he could go home to his own kids. Maybe he’d read James and the Giant Peach to them, and they thought it was pretty good, so he gave it a go as a read-aloud. He didn’t have music, sound effects, streaming audio, or a movie version we’d already seen. It was just the magic of an adult reading aloud to kids. It happens every day in classrooms, library storytimes, on laps, and it may not even matter how good the reader is, or even what book. This experience can’t be improved by technology or Hollywood, and hasn’t changed a bit since I was six. Human connection never becomes obsolete. That magic is free as air, because its source is love, and as we were reminded by John Lennon — whose death in 1980 is another one of my earliest memories — that's all we really need.
—Dan Coleman is a Senior Collection Development Librarian at Lawrence Public Library.
Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach
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