Just Finished Reading Flat Stanley by Jeff Brown

One of the things I like about the trivia game show Jeopardy! is that it sometimes gives me reading suggestions...children's book author Roald Dahl was a recent category that sent me in his direction.  But I had no similar expectation with the show preceding it, Wheel of Fortune, until the other night when the solution turned out to be "Flat Stanley"...making me scratch my head in puzzlement, although everyone in the studio seemed to know of this book, also for children.  So I looked it up and yes, Flat Stanley is not only a famous book first published by Jeff Brown in 1964, but years later he turned it into a series of books based on the Lambchop family, headlined of course by Stanley himself.  It starts out one morning when Stanley's brother Arthur goes into his room and discovers a big bulletin board has fallen off the wall and flattened him.  Stanley feels fine, but he's now thin enough to slide under a door, through a drainage grate, into an envelope...or even serve as a pretty awesome kite.  The story's premise is of course ridiculous, but like the more serious story Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, the absurdity of Stanley's condition is dwarfed by that of how the people around him react to it.  I checked it out of my library using the Libby service to download it onto my Kindle...it took just a few minutes to read.  The reading level reminded me of books I'd read around the first or second grade...makes me wonder whether I might have come across it way back when it first came out and just forgot I had read it.  In any event I got a big kick out of it, although I'm not sure I'll read any of its sequels...and that maybe the author ripped off that scene at the end of the Disney movie Pinocchio when Jiminy Cricket mails himself to a prime vacation spot...