I'm rereading this for the first time since elementary school, and I gotta say, I'm really blown away by the sheer absurdity of it. It reminds me of James Marshall's George and Martha stories: absurd, but lovely in that they never apologize for being absurd or wink at you from beneath the absurdity. It's just absurd all the way down, sincerely and deeply absurd. I imagine after you graduate from George and Martha, you move on to Wayside, and from there you're ready for Beckett and Camus. ( )

This was one of my favorite books as a kid - I actually loved all the Wayside books! I read this one aloud to my nieces (ages 6, 8, 10) and they enjoyed it, too. This is full of truly silly stories that are just fun!

A note for parents/teachers: The children do use a few put-downs like "dumb" and "stupid." ( )

Fond memories reading this in elementary school. The short chapters, each being a self contained story, is a strength for younger readers. ( )

Growing up this was my jam!

Somehow it eluded my child brain that Louis Sachar had written all of these books and more. I didn't realize he wrote Holes and Wayside School, and also every other book that I really really liked at the time. It seems like this man really wrote a bunch of books and I never noticed that they were all by the same person, and I'm sure he wrote even more books that I haven't read and I needed to read as a child. And there's something whimsical about how when you're a child you don't know the author is the same as another book and sometimes you sit in the same section staring at all these books by this one author and never realized they're correlated.

I've never really met anybody who either didn't remember this book or couldn't remember this book. If they had read this book at all in their life all I would need to do is remind them of a certain scene and it would immediately come flooding back. This was such a fun book series that I remember singing songs from it on the playground and somebody knowing what book I was singing from.

That said this book absolutely messed me up and so did the other books in this series. I was maybe six and I was reading about a teacher wiggling her ears and turning kids into apples and then the idea of cannibalism maybe? Because if you're students are apples and you eat apples is that not cannibalism? And what if another kid walks in and eats the apples that are also their students? What happens if say a pair of twins one of them gets turned into an apple and the other twin walks in and eats that twin how do you explain that? The ideas that those single scenes cause me to think about probably stayed in my head forever.

I didn't even know what cannibalism was as a child and still I was thinking it's weird that somebody's an apple now does that mean they can be eaten? Would that be a legal? Would they look for the body? I guess there's a little bit of Law and Order going on in my brain even as a child.

The writing was very simple but there is something whimsical about it it gave you just enough to form a picture but enough vagueness that your mind would give more details that didn't exist. The teacher that turns people into apples for example I always imagined her with bigger ears and kind of a more bat face and it turns out that she's not really described as having a bad face but it stuck in my brain is that was in the book. Which is wonderful, Louis has a skill at making us think of details that never existed and sort of Mandela effecting our brain.

There are some flaws and outdated things like obviously some kids are called ginger and some kids are called fat or poorly, but I think that that adds to the childishness of this book. These are children talking about each other and talking like children do, the only difference is between them is usually size, height, and weight. Along with hair color. And in a school like this they very quickly stop focusing on each other and focus on everything else around them.

Even though the flaws are there they add to it instead of taking from it. A rarity among writing. We know that the children are not perfect, what children are? And some of them have nasty habits and nasty flaws.

I cannot think this book enough nor the entire series for shaping me and helping me have a little bit more of a comedy bone growing in me. Louis has such skill with comedy that we fans really miss this guy and I sure hope he's doing well. I have never really looked into his life or if he still writing, I just hope that he knows he really shaped a lot of people's childhoods and it changed some of us.

Holes will always have its place I'm my heart, and it's right beside Wayside School. Perhaps Wayside School will fall into Holes.

5 stars ( )

2017 re-read: It has definitely lost some of its charm now that I'm older but it's still quite entertaining. Louis Sachar captures really well the kind of absurd and nonsensical humour that kids love. ( )