I grew up with Roald Dahl, just like everyone else. I knew what an Oompa Loompa was, I loved Matilda, I was terrified of The Witches and deeply, deeply suspicious of Willy Wonka. I could pick out a Quentin Blake illustration from half a mile away.

But I’d never actually read a Roald Dahl book. I had absorbed the books via a sort of cultural osmosis, to the point that it felt as if I’d already read his work. Having seen a few film adaptations, I almost convinced myself that I had. Because surely I had. How could anyone born in the mid-80s not read Roald Dahl? Especially a book-loving kid like I was, sitting on an itchy library carpet under a blanket of open books.

I’m part of the #BookVsFilmClub, and with The BFG chosen as our next book-and-film pairing, I finally had an excuse, at the age of 30, to explore the books that passed me by as a child.

Boy, was I missing out. I expected The BFG to be a charming, easy read, probably quite dated. And compared to the thrill-a-minute kids’ books of today, it is extravagantly quaint. But Dahl, I discovered, has a surprisingly wicked sense of humour. He has a wonderfully sharp, deadpan turn of phrase, and many adult authors could learn a lot from the neatness of his descriptions. He’s also not above a good fart joke – or a whizpopping gag, as he might say – and quite right too.

Despite having lived a Dahl-free existence until recently, I still read a lot of kids’ books, and perhaps this is me wearing my when-I-were-a-lass hat, but modern children’s books have grown overly keen on forcing their protagonists to grow up. Parents are stripped away (often in traumatic circumstances) and the fates of entire worlds are placed on the child hero’s shoulders. Dahl, however, allows his children to be children. Sophie, the heroine of The BFG, is an orphan and survivor of scary adventures, but she does it all under the protection of the BFG. Knowing that Sophie herself is never in any real danger gives Dahl a safety net to take the reader’s imaginations to some very dark places. How many of today’s kids’ books dwell in such cheerily gory detail on children getting chewed up by giants?

What surprised and delighted me most is Dahl’s love of words and stories. Matilda is the most obvious story-lover, but it’s there in The BFG too, in the beautifully indulgent portmanteau words littered through the book (“dreadly”, “delumptious”, “scrumdiddlyumptious”). I would have delighted in those words as a child; even the grownup me was excited by the freedom with which he throws made-up words around. It’s one of those things you do as a child that most of us sadly grow out of. Can’t find the right word in your limited juvenile vocabulary? Just throw some sounds together in a funny order.

The BFG is a classic (and literal) tall story, escalating its boasts with every page until we reach a barnstorming finale starring the Queen and the Royal Air Force for good measure. It all takes me immediately back to being a child, standing in front of my parents and explaining, with growing implausibility, that it wasn’t me who ate all the jam, it was a burglar. The BFG never feels juvenile or silly, because it captures that feeling of being a child so well. While child readers are whisked to the magical Giant Country, adult readers get a trip to the equally magical land of early-years nostalgia.

Thankfully, I never grew out of my tendency to pick up whatever book was to hand and stick my nose in it. Few children’s books that I have read as an adult have taken me back to being a child like The BFG did. I might have been reading it in a flat full of boring grownup furniture that I bought with my own money, but for a little while I was back on that library carpet, trying to read the first chapter of five books at once, overwhelmed by the richness of words and stories on offer. What an indulgent treat. I’m already planning on belatedly giving my seven-year-old self the role model she deserved by finally reading Matilda.