A Mountain Of Coke

One of the best things about having a kid who reads is having a good excuse to get copies of all your old childhood favorites and re-reading them.

One of the weird things about doing that is reading those books from the perspective of an adult. Especially in books that were published more than fifty years ago.

In Henry Huggins, Beverly Cleary references (three times!) Henry going to the pet store to buy horse meat for his dog. This sparked a very special conversation with Katarina, who was not aware horses were ever used for dog food.

That was easier to explain than this little gem found on page 51 of The Borrowers:

Two borrowers, Pod and Homily (if you haven't read the books, you should be imagining very little people living under the floorboards of a house in England), are having a conversation about other borrower families traveling over the fields to move to another house,

"And what did they find there?" asked Pod unkindly, "A mountain of coke!"

A mountain of coke!

Such a special moment in children's literature. Thanks for that Mary Norton.

I'm hoping that a mountain of coke was a different thing in 1950s England.

Have you been surprised to find a book you loved as a child wasn't exactly the way you remembered it when you re-read it as an adult?

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