LFL #2: Charlotte's Web

From now on, I'll put LFL in the titles of posts about books I get from Little Free Libraries.

So, I returned The Dogs of Babel, and I saw that one of the LFLs had Charlotte's Web, by E. B. White. I'd never read it before (though I knew the story pretty well, having seen the movie), and I decided to actually see the original work.

Well, it's a children's book, so of course I didn't enjoy it as much as I could have if I'd read it earlier in my life. It's...okay. Very short, very simplistic, and very straightforward. I was hoping for there to be more areas where it diverged from the story I'd seen so many times before, but it didn't. It basically just has the plot points and a few minor things to help characterization. Beyond that, there isn't much to the book.

Certain things stood out to me, though. Charlotte is first thought, by Wilbur, to be bloodthirsty because of the way she sustains herself. Even though most of the animals in the story are able to speak, Charlotte's victims don't. We never see the bugs she kills screaming for mercy or bemoaning their fate. Yet, by the logic of the book, we should. It's interesting, too, that Fern can hear what the animals are saying very clearly, and no one else can. Perhaps all these things are simply what she imagines they are saying, a way of making sense of the things she sees them do? Plus, the animals do a lot of things that make them seem obviously intelligent, and yet the humans have never noticed any of these signs. Everyone assumes that Charlotte's words are a miracle, and not the spider's own work--why? I would think the spider would be the one to get more attention than the pig it's describing.

Rating: 3.2/10