So, I was thinking about something else, as you do, when the novel Holes crept into my mind. I used to teach it to Year 8, before the decision was made to do Literature Circles at Year 7 and 8. Then I gathered a few copies as a potential Literature Circles text. It's a novel often studied at primary school, but really needs good readers to study it and understand it properly. We also had kids who requested it the year after it went off the booklist, so I checked it out to them.
I simply love that story about a boy who is sent to a punishment camp for a crime he didn't commit, where the boys are required to dig holes in the desert, because the Warden is looking for something that is connected with the history of the place, which used to be a thriving town by a lake, instead of a desert. There's a wonderfully fantastical element to it, as there tends to be in Louis Sachar's YA fiction.
It was also a good film, a classic in its own right. The young Shia LeBeouf played the role of the hero, Stanley Yelnats. In the novel, Stanley was overweight and took off weight during the story, but that was a bit hard to arrange in a film that is made out of order. They decided to go for a "young Tom Hanks" type instead.
The delightful Eartha Kitt played the gypsy Madame Zeroni, who placed the curse on the Yelnats family in the first place, because their ancestor had failed to carry out his agreement with her.
Stanley's gently nutty inventor dad was played by Henry Winkler, whom the older among us remember as "the Fonze" from Happy Days.
The onion man from 19th century Green Lake was played by Dule Hill, who may be familiar to you as President Jed Bartlett's aide, Charlie(West Wing)and in one scene you see him selling an onion tonic to a townsman who was played by Louis Sachar himself.
Sigourney Weaver, who has played many a heroine in her time, was the evil Warden, the villain of the film.
It's just such a wonderful novel that I had to read it again. So I downloaded it from iBooks and you know what? I'm finding myself slipping comfortably back into it. It will be a definite case of comfort reading.
Not to mention a bad case of inability to defer gratification! Ah, well, them's the breaks.
Anyone else have this problem with ebooks?
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