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3.96 AVERAGE
3.96 AVERAGE
Dan Stevens does another marvelous job narrating Dahl's exploits. This book was even funnier and more violent than the last (a woman being eaten by a lion! deadly snakes! plane crash! the war!) and so I was completely sucked in. Teenage me, and even younger me, would have loved reading Dahl's daring adventures.
adventurous
funny
lighthearted
fast-paced
A riveting memoir of a Royal Air Force Pilot's life & travels & daring adventures, all set just before and during World War II. Highly recommend it!
adventurous
challenging
emotional
informative
tense
fast-paced
Well I appreciated that much more now than when I was eight.
I love Roald Dahl's books and this was no exception! What an exciting time it was to be alive, and the adventures he had! All great fodder for his future books.
Absolutely adored this book! We read it out loud to each other & finished it with both of us in tears. A great book to read together out loud. I highly recommend it, as it is full of interesting & well written stories. Actual photographs included! One story early on is pretty graphic about death by sword, so you've been warned.
heh. recommended to me by Miriam, who noticed that it wasn't on my Flying shelf. That's because I read it long before I set up my Goodreads account! Dahl's account of the Battle of Athens is one of my touchstones - the desperation and exhaustion of the RAF pilots, their relative cluelessness about what's going on everywhere else, the hands that shake too much to hold a cigarette when you're back on the ground - it's incredibly vivid and has influenced my own writing. The rest of the book is jaw-dropping too, for its evocation of 1930s Kenya and Empire life there. Going Solo is perhaps not Dahl's most lauded piece of writing but it's certainly the one I recommend most often.
There! On my flying shelf now!
There! On my flying shelf now!
A bit of an abrupt ending, but sweet. Very factual, child-friendly tone for a war book where several of his colleagues die. All in all, an enjoyable read, but a bit shallow.
A good sequel to Boy, but I couldn't really get into it because combat stories don't interest me much, and this book was jam-packed with them. He had a lot of exciting, legitimate adventures, but I'm a bigger fan of his schoolboy pranks and descriptions of horrid school life because his writing style is much more fun to read when he discusses that. There were some decent scenes in this book (such as the bald man faking his dandruff), but his combat stories could have been written by anyone. He's brilliant when discussing the grotesque and cruel, and unfortunately, this book, due to its subject matter, was missing a lot of the fun that I associate with Dahl.