It’s one of my favourites - I just like the way you go through the whole book thinking the speaker is getting increasingly angry with Marvin, when in fact, he’s just telling him it’s time to go, which Marvin cheerfully accepts.
It seems I was thinking of Hooray for Diffendoofer Day. Not sure why I made that mistake (neither book is in my collection; maybe someone showed me both at the same time).
Oh, I love Solla Sollew - especially the Midwinter Jickers.
Be warened - I do not know a young child who has not been spooked by the story “What was I scared of?” from “The Skeetches”.
“To think that I saw it on Mulberry St” is a beautiful, perfect story. “The Lorax” makes me cry every time I read it, “Horton Hatches the Egg”. oh my. “Marvin K Mooney”, and of course his saddest book - “Hop on Pop”.
I love Dr Seuss so.
mm
That was always my favourite as a child. I always make sure to read it completely in character with my own kids.
Solla Sollew has its moments; I guess it’s just not at the top of my list. I don’t think there are any Seuss books I would discard entirely.
I remember that book! My kindergarten teacher used to read it to our class.
Ha! Me too! You can go by plane, you can go by fish. You can go by Krunk-Car, if you wish!
Time might have warped my memory, but I’m sure my dad could recite the whole thing, given the number of times I made him read it out to me. I was also fond of The Foot Book. Left foot, right foot, feet feet feet. How many, many feet you meet!
Bartholomeow and the Oobleck? We did that as a play in school. And on a completely unrelated note, it inspired a friend of mine to name her cat Bartholo-meow.
I can also add that my daughter will, if she is stalling for time before bed, ask us to read One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish which is pretty long, for a children’s book.
By the way, some of the Seuss books – I think the ABC Book and also the Foot Book – have been altered or simplified in the board-book format. If you’re a purist, you might want to look for the older editions of these books, with their bona fide infant-destroyable paper pages.
In general, I like Seuss’s older stuff. I find with some of the newer stuff, like the Lorax, that the preachy note predominates.
The same thing happened to my copy of that book!
I could probably recite “One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish” entirely from memory. Wanna test me?
One Fish
Two Fish
Red Fish
Blue Fish
Black Fish
Blue Fish
Old Fish
New Fish
This one has a little car
This one has a little star
My! What a lot of fish there are…
And of course, my favorite page:
See what we found
In the park in the dark
We will take him home
We will call him Clark
We will take him home
He will grow and grow
Will our Mother like this?
We don’t know.
During Watergate, Art Buchwald reprinted the entire text of this book (with Seuss’s permission), replacing each instance of “Marvin K. Mooney” with “Richard M. Nixon.” Unfortunately, “George W. Bush” doesn’t fit the same rhythm.
I loved The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, but it always gave my mom the All-Overs.
Don’t forget the national read-aloud at 2:36 p.m. Eastern Time on Friday, March 2, Dr. Seuss’s birthday, and the day after the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Cat in the Hat.
We’re having a writing contest (and a drawing contest for the preliterate) at the bookstore, and we’ll serve the pink ‘bathtub cake’ to commemorate the happy events.
That’s right- the reason it is at 2:36 is because there are 236 unique words used in the book. For more information, visit the Cat’s official website (warning: music- albeit appropriate music).
Check out this filk!
Actually, it was very much a cold war gem, published in 1984. My parents got it for us kids on a trip to DC to a big anti-war conference: the book had just come out, and it was how I first understood the nuclear arms race. I’ve not seen the book in 20 years, but it still chills me to remember the final page.
Daniel
When you say “Dr. Seuss books”, you must clarify what this means. Dr Seuss books could mean books under his name and/or books under the pen name Theo Lesig and/or “I Can Read Books” by various authors; yet, published under the “Cat in the Hat” logo.
By the way…when reading “Fox in Socks” aloud, use extreme caution!
- Jinx
Oh, the Sleep Book! I can still recite most of it - and I have the copy my dad used to read to us when getting us to settle down. It makes me yawn in a most delightful way just thinking of it!
Nitpick: “I Can Read” is the name used for beginning readers published by HarperCollins. Random House’s line of beginner books is, um, “Beginner Books.” You’re probably confusing the two because of Beginner Books’s logo, which depicts the Cat in the Hat and the words “I can read it all by myself.” (Dr. Seuss was the president of Beginner Books, incidentially.)
My favorite! It just builds and builds and builds… I was a reading clinician a few years ago, and one of my students would beg for this book whenever we had a free moment. If you can get through it without any mistakes, your audience will be as proud of you as you are.
OK, what about There’s a Wocket in My Pocket! - I don’t own a copy of this book, but I have read it. I think it’s probably the least impressive. The artwork is just fine, but to my memory, it was just a collection of pointless, contrived rhymes (‘there’s a zamp in my lamp, behind the curtain, there’s a jertain’). Am I forgetting something wonderful about this title?