Pinocchio

Bedtime story this week has been Pinocchio, an edited re-telling of Carolo Collodi's 1883 original. I'd forgotten how utterly bonkers it is. I mean the Disney film is surreal, but the book is off the scale. Most of the story takes place in a kind of breathless, fantastical 'he did this and then he did that' over a number of days (except when he goes to the police to report he'd been robbed by Fox and Cat and when they put him in jail for being stupid, four months pass in a sentence! - excuse the pun). Of the infamous nose, in the film the good fairy simply clicks her fingers and it returns to normal, but here she summons "several thousand woodpeckers". 
Actually, in the original serialised version in an Italian newspaper, Pinocchio dies - hanged for his lies at the end of chapter 15!  (The editor convinced Collodi to resurrect him and ultimately there's a happier ending). They don't write them like that anymore.