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Sasha's Reviews > The Wind in the Willows
The Wind in the Willows
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I was suspicious of this book when I was a kid. It's all, "Hey kids, here's a fun story about talking animals," right? And I was like no, this is just you banging on about trees. This is a pastoral poem in disguise. It's boring. This book is like the guy who comes into your classroom and sits backwards on a chair all, "Sammy the sock puppet is here to get real about abstinence!" It's like when your mom was like "I froze this banana and it's just as good as a popsicle!" It is not. Mom is full of shit.
More things that are bullshit
- Carob
- The Berenstain Bears
- Mathletes
-
You can't fool kids, and since I am super immature you can't fool me either: Wind in the Willows is still boring. I'm not saying it's all bad! The parts with Mr. Toad are pretty entertaining. Poop poop! Lol, I'm on Team Toad. And it's sweet that Ratty and Mole are
blah blah blah trees and shit
But it's like sitting through Mr. Rogers just to get to the Make-Believe stuff. In between there are just pages and pages of hogwash like this:
So, what was bullshit for you when you were a kid? Knowing is half the battle! Now I want a popsicle.
More things that are bullshit
- Carob
- The Berenstain Bears
- Mathletes
-
You can't fool kids, and since I am super immature you can't fool me either: Wind in the Willows is still boring. I'm not saying it's all bad! The parts with Mr. Toad are pretty entertaining. Poop poop! Lol, I'm on Team Toad. And it's sweet that Ratty and Mole are
blah blah blah trees and shit
But it's like sitting through Mr. Rogers just to get to the Make-Believe stuff. In between there are just pages and pages of hogwash like this:
"Mole stood still a moment, held in thought. As one wakened suddenly from a beautiful dream, who struggles to recall it, but can recapture nothing but a dim sense of the beauty in it, the beauty! Till that, too, fades away in its turn, and the dreamer bitterly accepts the hard, cold waking and all its penalties."And here's what that is: it's booooring.
So, what was bullshit for you when you were a kid? Knowing is half the battle! Now I want a popsicle.
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Reading Progress
June 19, 2015
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Started Reading
June 19, 2015
– Shelved
June 23, 2015
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Finished Reading
June 25, 2015
– Shelved as:
2015
June 25, 2015
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rth-lifetime
June 25, 2015
– Shelved as:
novel-a-biography
January 22, 2016
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Eh?Eh!
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Jun 25, 2015 06:41AM
I remember how smart and brave Nancy Drew was, and I tore through all the books I could find in my school library, public library, drooling over the ones I came across at used bookstores. And then soon afterwards learning about the Hardy Boys, who totally copied Nancy Drew down to the look of her books! Years later I learned that Carolyn Keene wasn't a real person and the Hardy Boys were published first. And then there were these Nancy Drew spinoffs that got her all wrong, throwing in this romance crap and changing her from a no nonsense sleuth to a girly girl. It was all so disappointing.
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Nooooooooo! Team Mole all the way! Anyone who drops his spring cleaning to go outside for an adventure is my hero for life.
Aw, I loved this one! It's true that I am pretty boring, though. The version illustrated by David Roberts is fantastic, especially for the scenes featuring Toad (who is the coolest, although I was always partial to Rat).
I remember that i stayed at my cousins the summer I was four and every night they played a record of The Wind In The Willows at bedtime. It worked. Super boring.My nephew loves it though! He has been listening to it at night for the past year or two.
I love it now, though.
I thought toads peed (vs. pooped) on hands as a defense mechanism. Maybe not in the Willows, though.Never read this, and it's on my "No Intention To" list (not a part of my shelves, though maybe it should be).
I love it too. I don't think it's a child's book at all. It's an ode to the pleasures of loafing..."No animal, according to the rules of animal-etiquette, is ever expected to do anything strenuous, or heroic, or even moderately active during the off-season of winter." I love that. And also it's a deeply felt account of a kind of friendship that doesn't exist any longer, where you drop everything for the sake of someone to whom you have no actual obligation to at all. I'm transported also by the pastoral loveliness of the scenes...including the bit Alex quotes in his review as boring hogwash...I love this book!
I love the sentence Alex quotes too. Like floating down a river in a little boat...
Beekeeping!
Fun for the whole family (just like school!)
I like your review Alex. But I have not listened to (on tape while sleeping) The Wind in the Willows since I was very small. I didn't like it very much. I also thought it was boring but then I didn't understand all the words and would fall asleep knowing it was going to be played. I think I will try it again in my adult years as I like all the hogwash words. And I still hold into my fantasy that animals really do have a life that's worthy of a cool story. :)
Poingu wrote: "I love it too. I don't think it's a child's book at all. It's an ode to the pleasures of loafing..."Aha. So that's part of the appeal.
My own fondness for it stems mainly from my son's love of it when he was quite young. We had endless river picnics (occasionally real, but mostly imaginary) as a result, and his first theatre trip was to a production of it.
Ha...Cecily's review calls out the "twee quasi homo subtext," and that's almost certainly the best phrase I'm going to read today,
Oh no you didn't just describe my Wind in the Willows as boring!
One of my sons was once fixated on the clay-mation movie version of this. He is now 17 and granted, he has significant autism, but to this day he doesnt call my hub “Dad.� He calls him Badger. Also, because of said fixation, I know every word of every song.
Jesus.Jesus was bullshit to me as a kid.
U funny tho, thanks for your enjoyable review!
Thank you! I have always grimaced politely in the company of friends nostalgic about TWITW. I
Dearly Eh person, pls Google Carolyn Keene. I'm not able to paste the link for some reason. It was a pseudonym but she was indeed a real person. She was only ever paid a few thousand dollars, which stinks. Did you ever read the Bobbsey Twins?
Sturbridge Village had excellent maple sugar for sale, so it was hardly a wasted trip, even if my neighbors were making their own back home in New Hampshire.
We had a a frightening experience at Plymouth I dunno maybe 15 years ago when my son was 12. I hadn't realized how monstrous that place was.
I hated Beatrix Potter. For those of us who lived in the dark, her books were written for tourists.
What happened to Eh? anyway? I used to talk to you all the time!I still haven't been to Plymouth, despite spending most of my life in Massachusetts.
Plymouth must be haunted, with its history. I used to have The Wind in the Willows on my never list until your review. No. I do not have oppositional defiant disorder. Your review was lovely, and in essence I fully agree, but I resonated deeply with the quote you pulled. So now it is on my to be read shelf along with Anne of Green Gables.As to things I knew were bs as a child... my paternal grandmother didn’t really approve of me, though she taught me things, so I took her with a teaspoon of disdain.
Ha - well, I would certainly never want to judge anyone else's resonance. And Anne of Green Gables is on my list too! I keep meaning to read that; I never have.Oh, disapproving grandmothers. I can't imagine what's going through their heads.
I have always wanted to visit Plymouth. (I had ancestors there, on top of everything else.)I had a couple of very spooky experiences when I was 10-13 or so, once at Stonehenge (when they actually let you in among the stones), and again at Gettysburg. Scared the daylights out of my parents (one each was at each place with me). Same reaction, which I can only describe as a tremendous feeling of the presence of the dead.
Learning that it derives from stories he told his son (years before his son’s early death of course) does give some extra-literary interest, but I found myself enjoying the book very much when I read it recently. An ode to friendship, even.
Omg, that was hilarious! I wish I could right reviews like that by I'm just not that funny. For me, as a kid, it was burgers. We hardly ever got McDonald's or Burger King and we NEVER had the proper hamburger buns so my mom would make a hamburger patty and put it between two slices of bread!!! Sick.
Oh no, Annie! What a nightmare! How did any of us make it through our weird, deprived childhoods? I almost never had McDonald's either.My favorite part about this review is that I'm friends with my mom on ŷ, so there's a fair chance she's read me calling bullshit on my childhood. Pssst, I didn't like orange juice popsicles either, Mom. Sometimes I would go over other kids' houses and they'd have Real Popsicles with, like, sugar and artificial colors, and I'd be like oh man, when I grow up I'm gonna eat shit like this all the time. And I do.
But I don't give it to my son. He can have frozen bananas and like it.
<- grew up on hamburgers served between two slices of bread; still eats them that way; is confused?I never went to a McDonalds before I was ten, and then it was for breakfast.
Annie 📚 📖⚜️ wrote: "...For me, as a kid, it was burgers. We hardly ever got McDonald's or Burger King and we NEVER had the proper hamburger buns ..."You were lucky to have any sort of burgers. I was 16 before I had my first one, and probably older than that for my first pizza!
(I'm not a senior or pensioner. But I did grow up in an English village.)
I just have a family that doesn't believe in fast food if you can possibly avoid it!
Susanna - Censored by GoodReads wrote: "I just have a family that doesn't believe in fast food if you can possibly avoid it!"Yes, that too. To this day, I probably have about one burger every couple of years. (In the past, I occasionally made them, but they weren't "fast".)
We have pizza every couple of months (because sometimes you don't want to cook, and our local Chinese place doesn't deliver), but I can't remember the last time I ate classic "fast food." I think it's been over a year.Had burgers earlier this week, but I was the one who cooked them.
This book is as good example of British romantic sentimentalism about some kind of utopian rural past that never existed. Other books like this, or partake of some of this, are Watership Down, The Chronicles of Narnia, and the Shire in Lord of the Rings.It's one thing for kids to read these books, but it's silly for adults who want to keep living in these worlds. I have a friend who has literally read Lord of the Rings more than 50x.
Whether Plymouth is haunted is not the spooky part. It's the reenactors who straight seriously creepy, the way they won't admit they are only acting. Go to the neighboring Native American village where you have Indian interpretors instead of reenactors, and you'll see how unhealthy the Plymouth version is--as it always was.
Michael wrote: "This book is as good example of British romantic sentimentalism about some kind of utopian rural past that never existed."Ah, the old utopian rural past. America's version includes Walden and Little House on the Prairie. Love that point and the books you cited - I'd never thought to group those all together, but I totally get it.
now back to yelling about hamburgers and historical actors! I can't remember the last time I was at McD's or BK, but I get a big disgusting breakfast sandwich at Dunkin Donuts about twice a year and I enjoy the shit out of it.
Michael wrote: "This book is as good example of British romantic sentimentalism ..."Ooh, I'd not thought of that as a category, but yes.
Michael wrote: "It's one thing for kids to read these books, but it's silly for adults who want to keep living in these worlds. I have a friend who has literally read Lord of the Rings more than 50x."
I'd rather people read children's classics than nothing at all. Also, there are many non-silly reasons to read them: to read to a child, for academic study of the genre, and when one needs comfort of happier times. And the complex world and language-building of LotR puts it in a different category, I think. Nevertheless, 50 times does seem... odd.
Maybe reading it knowing what happened rather later to his son for whom he wrote it added a layer of poignancy, besides which I hadn’t read it in years if ever...
(this book here, that is.)
Are they or aren't they? (Mole & Rat, "gay.") In a culture where asexuality was idealized and homosexuality was unmentionable, there's no way of knowing. They could be anything. If adult readers want them to be "gay" they are. For child readers who don't want to be bored by adult sexuality, they're ace. Grahame probably thought they were celibate heterosexuals and they work that way too. That's one thing that makes the story a classic. But then, I also liked carob.
100% agree, all those things are bullshit, especially carob. Especially when motherfuckers LIE and tell you it's chocolate.
You know what else is bullshit? The whole Elsie Dinsmore genre of kids' books that are designed to guilt children into being Good.
I thought Anne of Green Gables was boring but at least she had a personality.
You didn't even get to the part about toad!!!!! Then you wouldn't be saying it's boring, because then it gets really funny! Also why does everyone make the same boring joke about them being gay? Sorry people forgot what friendship is and think everything is sexual?! Not really a funny joke! But you know what would actually make someone laugh? These stories!
who said it was a joke? it's the plot of the book
You had me until the part about Mr Rogers. I’m never bored by anything on Mr Rogers except watching Marilyn Barnett do exercises but that’s because I’m not a kid and I’m not gonna do them.
Alex-it’s a collection of stories written for and read to his rather young son. So no, that’s not the intended foreground plot, try again.
Eric wrote: "Alex-it’s a collection of stories written for and read to his rather young son. So no, that’s not the intended foreground plot, try again."Eric, what makes you think stories read to his young son wouldn't be about a gay couple?
