Theodor Seuss Geisel would have been 100 years old this past weekend. He was a prolific writer, more than sixty books. I have ten. Sixty is impressive by anyone’s count. I don’t love him, I don’t hate him, I generally don’t care. I was sorry for Sam in Green Eggs and Ham, because Sam was being chased and badgered, and chased and badgered, all through the story. I really felt for the girls I knew named Sally, because the sister in The Cat in the Hat was well, you know, if you’ve read it. I did like One fish two fish red fish blue fish, especially the lines:
From near to far, from here to there,
Funny things are everywhere.
The funniest Seuss ever was to me was when my high school daughter dressed up for Halloween as Thing Two from The Cat in the Hat and her spanish teacher named her Cosa Dos. Now that cracked me up, the book, not so much.
What if You Don’t Love Dr. Seuss?
I liked Eastman’s Go Dog Go! and Are You My Mother? much more, same genre, better illustrations.
It may have been the artwork which was kind of scary, not funny. So confessing this iconic children’s writer was not my favorite, hmmmm, why. Read what you like to your kids, so you keep doing it. The point is to give them a love for reading and for books. If you are forcing yourself to read books you don’t really enjoy, they will figure it out. Kids are smart! Read what you like, read what they like and hope they intersect while you are reading out loud!
An aside: In addition to feeling badly as a kid for little girls named Sally because of the sister in The Cat in the Hat, I also felt really sorry for the parents of little girls named Monica the summer of 1998, all the little boys named Charlie Brown and anyone named Kermit after Sesame Street came out. You spend a long time choosing a name for your child and then, wham, it becomes a byword. Yikes.
