by E.B. White
I haven\’t read Charlotte\’s Web in years, but I feel that I know it very well. It\’s a classic children\’s story about a pig who is befriended by a spider. Wilbur the pig was the runt of the litter and due for death but the farmer\’s eight-year-old daughter Fern rescued him. She raised him as a pet. When he got too big, he went to live on her uncle\’s farm. There Wilbur soon learned that his life wasn\’t secure after all; he was being fattened up for Christmas dinner. But Charlotte the spider came up with a plan to save his life… by creating what some considered a miracle. Charlotte\’s Web is a wonderful little story. The spider is calm and wise, and shows off an advanced vocabulary. The pig is charming, sweet and prone to emotional hysterics. There\’s a large cast of other animal characters, and the little girl Fern, whose mother worries about her because she claims the animals talk. This was one of my favorite books as a child, and I still like to go back and read it now and again.
I thought of it today because of a dream I had last night. In part of the dream, my apartment was covered with spiders and spiderwebs. I snipped the threads to collapse the webs, but couldn\’t bring myself to touch the round sticky egg-sacs. I said to myself in the dream: \”Wilbur should have crushed the egg-sac on his tongue. Then the world wouldn\’t be peopled by spiders. I wonder what it would have tasted like? Ticklish, maybe…\” What a strange thing to think of a lovely book!
Rating: 4/5 184 pages, 1952
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