General thoughts about Dr Seuss and Childrens books

So I've been reading every night to Fia for about 2 solid years, and we have gone through a lot of books. The 'No More' series by Peony Lewis was her favorite for a while. The "Oakey" series was her favorite. Right now she likes "Charlie and Lola" and to be honest, Lynette and I like it too. But we have always included those stories that we read, or had read to us when we were children.

Slight tangent. I saw a collection of humorous thoughts, and one of them was, "Sometimes I'll watch a movie when I was younger and realize I had no idea what was going on when I first watched it." Specifically this rang true with Indiana Jones. When the 4th movie came out recently, I rewatched the previous 3 and realized that I don't like the movies. I could have sworn I did. I remember liking them. But I guess I was wrong. Cause all 3 never sparked true interest. Just mild nostalgia.

But back on point. That same theory can be adapted to books. Before I had a kid, I would have told you, and beat into your head, that I liked Dr Seuss. When Fia was young we read a select few of them as I thought was necessary. And we read and enjoyed books like, "The Cat in the Hat" and "I saw it all on Mulberry Street" but then when we expanded our horizons, I found that Dr Seuss made no sense.

Has anyone read "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish in the last 10 years? It starts out like you expect, with fish. Then less than 10 pages into it, the fish story translates back to land. "From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere." and that's the last line that makes sense to any plot. Any random page contains a short, meaningless story that makes no sense. Let me flip randomly and paraphrase a page. A lady calls Ned. She asks how things are in his bed. He replies by saying that he is not having fun and a cow, a dog, a cat and mouse are all in his bed with him. And the page prior and following have totally different stories. The entire book is like that. I firmly believe that Dr Seuss was heavily on drugs when writing this book. That would make sense. When Dr Seuss says, "Whoa, dude. What if this lady calls Ned. And Ned is in his bed. Duuuuuude. That'll be awesome."

I mean, some stories are cool. Cat in the Hat mostly makes sense. And I actually liked, I Saw it all on Mulberry Street. But we have read our fair share of Dr Seuss, and for better or worse, about half of his stories revert into a page-by-page mini-stories that are just there for the sake of rhymes and a string of 2-paragraph sub plots.

Hop of Pop seems to split the difference. It is that same page-by-page mini-story that is neither here nor there. But it is redeemed in the fact that every word is the very basics of speech that the beginning reader can latch onto.

And let me finish by saying that there are a list of stories that are very well written, have a good story, a great moral and are just straight-out entertaining for me and my daughter. Yertle the Turtle. Gertrude McFuzz. And others provide wonderful stories and great morals. I like those.

But those aren't the books that I remembered loving. I liked The Cat in the Hat, and even worse, One Fish Two Fish. It was horrible.