From playful and fun, to politically correct: Censoring Roald Dahl

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Roald Dahl books, nationally revered and loved by kids everywhere, are having lots of alterations made to them by woke, politically correct editors who want to appease snowflake adults.  Roald Dahl, nationally revered and loved by kids (lots of whom are also adults now), is also dead and unable to speak out against the censorship being placed on his books.

I am against censorship in books and I am against banning books; sanitising them isn’t too far off. There are books and authors whose writing I despise – but I don’t believe in rewriting or banning them. Even if it is Salman Rushdie.

It seems to me that people would rather pull the wool over their children’s eyes than use ‘offensive’ language as an opportunity to explain the real world to them; the real world which, might I add, is a lot worse than how Dahl portrayed it. And let’s be very honest, the reason we love those books so much is because that language is all around us; it’s playful and it’s descriptive and it’s something we understand. I’m sorry you don’t like the words ‘ugly’ and ‘attractive’, but they are adjectives that exist nonetheless. It makes no sense to censure the use of the word ‘ugly’ when it is being used to describe characters whose entire story is based on the fact that they are ugly (both inside and out). How do you rewrite that? Not to go all Hopkins-Clarkson-Morgan, but I don’t understand why we need gender-neutral terms in the books either. I cannot, for the life of me, understand why ‘Cloud-men’ is more offensive than ‘Cloud-people’. Why is the word ‘man’ offensive? Men and women, boys and girls, exist; this fact shouldn’t offend anyone, regardless of their own beliefs about gender. Are we going to rewrite every character in every book as gender-neutral? Must we rewrite Harry Potter as the person who lived? Read more

After all you're not my type [Books I'll never finish]

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I get an influx of followers and then writers block decides to hit me bad! Amazing. But here I am, being the literary person I am and talking about books. Books that I hate. Books that I want to love. Books that I love but can’t finish. As my bookshelf grows, the percentage of unread books increases. And every now and then, my eye will catch a particular novel that I’ve tried, tried, and tried again to read, and just couldn’t. It haunts me.
Let’s talk about my bedroom for a sec. Oo er. I had books spilling out of my cupboard, falling off my desk, on the floor, in the corner, under the bed. Everywhere. Since then a lot of them have been moved to a sickasfrick bookshelf, which means I have more space for when I buy more books that I don’t intend to ever read!
I’ll show you my setup one day. It’s pretty weird for a blogger. No minimalism, no clean fresh look, no millennial pink. No candles, succulents, or quotes. Just a poster of Senna and a framed Patrick Bateman. That’s me. An improvement after a wall plastered with Kerrang and Metal Hammer pages, and various posters from HMV and Camden Market. But I digress. Again. Here are a bunch of books I’ve never been able to finish; please bear in mind that I am a Chuck Palahniuk girl through and through, so cut me some slack when I’m unable to finish a romance. Thanks, let’s begin x
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Hey Assbutt: Hijabi beauty bloggers

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Can I just start of with a little anecdote; I recently finished reading The Hours [for my Health & Illness module at university], and I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that I liked so much and that made me want to jump out of the window at the same time. For that reason I give it a 7/10 because it’s beautifully written, and the distressing nature of the novel is intentional –  I just didn’t care about the characters. If you want to read about depression, though, and a truly accurate portrayal of it, read this novel. Put down your YA fiction about cigarettes and broken hearts, novels that you know will have a happy ending, and pick up this one that will put you into the roadblocked mind of three women. It has a way of making you feel their depression without actually using the word ‘depression’.
Moving on, I’m revisiting a topic that I’ve been over time and time again. ‘Hijabi’ beauty bloggers. YouTubers. Aspiring make up artists. These women is they are perceived as ‘strong’ because they’re Muslim women who are making something out of their lives – they’re successful considering they’re Muslim.
However, to claim that they are ‘successful Muslim women’ is just atrocious. They’re successful women, sure. But successful ‘Muslim’ women?
How do you define success as a Muslim woman when the reason for your success goes against Islam? Call yourself a successful woman. Not a successful Muslim woman. [By the way, there isn’t anything successful about doing makeup and showing off your clothes on the internet. Anybody can do it, everybody does do it. There, I SAID IT.]
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