Light Reading

Owen and I read books together nearly every night before bed. After a long period in which he would only allow me to read a handful of non-fiction books (with the exception of Where’s Spot?), he’s finally allowing me to branch out into his entire reading library.

Here are some things I’ve noticed, and some other things I’m wondering…

One book Owen owns is a thick book of nursery rhymes. I don’t often bring this one out for fear he’ll insist I read every rhyme in the book (and the book does put forth an ambitious effort to include every nursery rhyme ever conceived), but reading these bizarre, often scary poems as an adult now has me asking:
What’s with the three men in a tub? I mean, let’s set aside the strange amalgam of blue-collar professionals sharing such tight quarters, what I find weird is that, in any illustrative depiction of the poem, the men are invariably in a barrel floating in a body of water. What gives? Should the poem be three men in a boat? Did “tub” used to mean “a thing you float in”?
And while we’re on the subject of nursery rhymes, why is Humpty always portrayed as an egg? Nothing in the poem seems to indicate this. What’s more, Humpty is shown to be a MALE egg. Again, nothing in the poem itself tells us what gender Humpty is, and I think you’d be pretty hard pressed to find something in the refrigerator that screams FEMALE! more than an egg.

Speaking of gender, one of our favorite books to read together is Wacky Wednesday. For the life of me, I can’t figure out the gender of the main character, despite the fact that he/she is shown on every single page – including one page in which he/she is naked but for a pair of socks. We never learn the protagonist’s name, and no one talks to him/her in any way that requires a telling pronoun. The boy/girl dons a pink shirt with jeans and sports hair going down just over his/her ears. Very cryptic.

Another Dr. Seuss book we read is Green Eggs and Ham. Here’s the funniest thing about that book: the pages are numbered. Yes, that’s right, despite the fact that there’s no table of contents or index, and despite the fact that the book can be read cover to cover in under five minutes, someone, somewhere along the way, felt it necessary to include page numbers. I guess, that way, when Owen comes to me with a confused look on his face asking: “Hey, where in this book does Sam-I-Am ask if his friend would be willing to eat green eggs and ham in a box or with a fox?” I can say, with precision, “Oh, that’s on page 22.”

You may not have heard of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, but in that book, a boy concedes to giving a mouse the above-mentioned dessert, only to have it escalate. The fun part is turning each page to see how it’s escalating. For instance, after eating the cookie, the mouse says he’s thirsty, so…(turn the page)…now he wants a glass of milk. Anyway, at one point, the mouse has drawn a picture and decides he wants to hang it on the fridge, so he needs…(drum roll)…Scotch Tape. You read that correctly: Scotch Tape. The first time I turn to this page, I felt cheated. Who hangs stuff on their fridge with Scotch Tape? Isn’t that why magnets were invented? It didn’t say he wanted a glass of Dean Milk, or a Nestle Toll House cookie. I searched the small print inside the front cover expecting to find something like “This book made possible by a grant from 3M”. No such luck. I hate when an otherwise good book does something stupid like pointless product placement.

In the book Where the Wild Things Are, we are told that Max is anointed “King of All Wild Things”. But I think a better title would be “King of All Run-on Sentences”. Here’s a doozy:

That very night in Max's room a forest grew and grew and grew until his ceiling hung with vines and the walls became the world around and an ocean tumbled by with a private boat for Max and he sailed off through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year to where the wild things are.

…Yep, that’s right: 62 words spread out over 5 pages, and that’s not even the longest sentence in the book. I am certain this book has more pages than sentences. I keep looking at the cover, expecting it to say “written by Thomas Jefferson”.

In the matter of funky sentence structure, I was going to mention Corduroy, with it’s predilection for passive statements (e.g. try to sound natural when reading things like “Over it fell with a crash.”), but, instead, allow me to point out one of the book’s reviews, which is reprinted on the inside front cover. The first sentence begins:

A winning, completely childlike picture book in which a stuffed bear waiting hopefully in a toy department finds a home with a little black girl...

…Yes, you read that correctly: Corduroy goes home to live with a black girl. Unlike, say, the Sneetches, ethnicity has absolutely nothing to do with the story, so I’m not sure why the reviewer was compelled to tell us Corduroy’s ultimate friend is black, nor why the publisher deemed this the best review to print in this edition.

My white son and I look forward to reading more books tonight.