The Running Bibliophile

The Witches by Roald Dahl: Honest Book Review, Themes, and Movie Comparison If you grew up loving spooky stories, there’s a good chance you remember the 1990 film The Witches . Recently, I found myself thinking about that movie again, and it led me down a nostalgic rabbit hole that ended with me finally reading the book for the first time. The first time I watched this movie was in middle school after renting it from a video store for a slumber party. I remember being completely terrified. So terrified, in fact, that I made my dad sit down and watch it with me and my friends. That reaction was unusual for me, especially since I’ve been watching horror movies since I was seven years old, starting with Poltergeist . For years, I thought The Witches was just a movie. I had no idea it was based on a novel by Roald Dahl. Somehow, I missed his books entirely as a child ... something I still find surprising. So reading The Witches as an adult felt both nostalgic and eye-opening. Quick ...

It  by Stephen King takes place in the town of Derry where there is something terrible lurking in the storm drains and sewers that takes the shape of children's worst nightmares and hunts them down. The adults in Derry are oblivious of what is lurking in their town. Join the Losers Club as they fight  It  as children and promise to come back to kill it if needed as adults. With the remake of the movie It coming out in the fall, I decided to read the book by Stephen King because I wanted to see the movie but not without first reading the book. In the month of May, I began reading It , and it took me four months to read it ... 4 months! Now, I did take a one week break where I read three other books, but the length of It was a bit too long for my liking. In the version I read, it was close to 1,500 pages! With that being said, I'm not sure that anything could have been cut from the book because it would have lost that wow factor for me. It's hard to be...