I also came back to say Guess How Much I Love You. Besides being instantly sick of repeating “nutbrown hare” over and over, the one-upmanship bothered me. My daughter has been given two copies and I’ve thrown them both away.
Another vote for Rainbow Fish. What a strange, terrible book.
I actually got into a friendly argument of sorts with a store clerk over that book. I was explaining that the point of the book is much better told (and resolved) in Dr. Seuss’s The Sneetches. There, the moral is “if you keep trying to change to fit in, you’ll never get anywhere.”
Rainbow Fish’s moral is “ripping off parts of your flesh is the only way to fit in, and you’d better do it too if you really want to have friends.”
Yeah, that definitely sounds right. The train looked so happy going off the tracks to play in the flowers only to become another cog in the machine of the railroad…
It was one of those kids books from my childhood with the hardcover and gold along the binding.
Aha! Found it. It was called “Tootle”. Buttercup was the key search word - much thanks!
That’s it, all right! Seeing that again brought back memories which have been in storage for well over 4 decades!
And i suspect that Stephen King must have read this book as a kid also, or else his portrayal of Charlie the Choo Choo and Engineer Bob in his book The Waste Lands wouldn’t have been so eerily familiar (and disturbing) to me. :eek:
If You Give a Moose a Muffin, he’ll respond to your perfectly reasonable act of charity and generosity by continuing to freeload progressively more and more from you until you shoot him and hang his head over the fireplace as a trophy. At least that’s how I think it ends; never really got that far into it.
This is the Socks book I was talking about.
At least the message was a bit counter-culture for the time: Get rid of your traces of white to fit in.
Still creepy.
Sir James Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, was one seriously fucked-up individual. (Pages 126, 127, and 128.) The dude made Lewis Carroll look like the poster boy for mental health.
The Girl Who Washed in Moonlight. It was about a girl whose wicked (step?)mother was angry at her beauty. So, she locked her up and took away her soap and water. The girl washed herself in milk for a while, then in the juice of a half-eaten apple. She gradually became dirtier and dirtier, until she stripped nekid and bathed in the moonbeams (which got her cleaner than she had ever been in her life).
I have no idea what the story was trying to say. I also forget how it ends! I managed to find it on Amazon, though, I might actually buy it.
Thanks for that, I just finished it!
And it was…interesting. I think I need to digest that for a while.
Or you could check out the musical version by the Tiger Lillies, Shockheaded Peter, in a delightfully grotesque cabaret style.
Some clips: The Dreadful Story of Harriet and the Matches.
Flying Robert
I can’t find a live performance but here’s the audio for Snip Snip, the thumb-sucking story.
The first story of the Boxcar Children. If your parents die and you’ve been told your grandfather is bad, run away and live by yourself in a boxcar.
To be fair, the Boxcar thing worked out for them for a little while, but they eventually do have to find help when one of them gets sick, and they learn a lesson about judging people they haven’t met. I think it’s a good message.
I would LOVE to get my hands on the original Boxcar Children Book that was written in the 1920s. The author, Gertrude Chandler, rewrote the book in the 40s so that the students in her second grade class could read it, and that’s the version that took off. The original story was skewed a bit higher, and was a little darker.
What, you don’t regard it as a metaphor for the Occupy Wall Street movement? Jack the proletarian, redistributing the means of production from the haute bourgeois giant? 
I’m getting the image of Rataxes Rizzo. “I’m charging here!”
Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods does a wonderful job of pointing out this sort of thing in fairytales. The witch in Rapunzel gets the girl as a baby after she catches the father stealing from her vegetable garden (“rapunzel” is another name for rampion or lamb’s lettuce) and agrees to let him go in return for the child. Jack steals all sorts of things from the giant; sure, he’s poor and the giant is nasty but he’s still a thief. And so on - in the second half of the musical the characters are forced to face up to the consequences of their rationalized misdeeds when the giant’s wife comes down for revenge and starts stamping on people. The witch delivers the killer line when the other characters refuse to give up Jack to the giantess: “You’re so nice. You’re not good, you’re not bad, you’re just nice. I’m not good, I’m not nice, I’m just right.” Of course, eventually they do defeat the giantess but it’s hardly the tidy fairytale ending they got at the end of the first half.
Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Samuel Whiskers is also about naughty children getting eaten up by an evil rat. It was terrifying, and my mum loved reading it. We used to hide it under the bed so she wouldn’t read it, but you could tell one was missing from the set so we’d still have to sit through a frightening bed time story 
Isn’t it just about Tom Kitten getting made into a pie, but not actually eaten?
I like its original title: "Lustige Geschichten und drollige Bilder mit 15 schön kolorierten Tafeln für Kinder von 3–6 Jahren (Funny Stories and Whimsical Pictures with 15 Beautifully Coloured Panels for Children Aged 3 to 6.)"
Just rolls off of the tongue, doesn’t it?
There’s that one book that tells kids butterflies come from cocoons. They don’t- moths do.
Possibly true actually. I just remember finding it horrific! Anyway, the kids get locked in a cupboard because mum can’t deal with them, Tom escapes and nearly gets made into a roly poly pudding by the most horrible rat in fiction. It’s not right I tell ya!