Fantastic Mr Fox

On New Year's Eve, Rachel's friend brought a gift of books. Fifteen books in all: a Roald Dahl box set. Looking over the titles, I only specifically remember reading the BFG, and maybe Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. New Year's Day, we read Fantastic Mr Fox as a family, though, and as we proceeded, it grew more and more familiar. I'm pretty sure now that I must have read it before, though I couldn't say when, nor whether it was read to me.

For those not familiar with the story, Mr Fox is under siege from three mean farmers for the crime of stealing their poultry. After escaping immediate danger through a lot of emergency digging, Mr Fox devises an ingenious plan to save his family from starvation and foil the designs of Boggis, Bunce, and Bean forever. It involves a lot more digging. It's a fast read, at only 82 pages.

Since then, Rachel has moved on to The Witches, one of the longer books. We watched the movie, with Anjelica Huston as the grand high witch, sometime during our last year in Pittsburgh, and that seemed to attract Rachel to it. She and I read the first few chapters together, alternating pages, but since then she has ventured further during quiet time and now her nightly reading time, by herself.

She does seem to enjoy being read to still, but she has also come a very long way in the last twelve months in terms of independent reading ability, and I'm happy to split the duties with her, even if it means I miss parts of the story.