A few more words about Seuss
I realized that I didn’t mention The Sneetches in my last post about books. Since I read it to Fiona 3 times yesterday and Liam read it once (and we spend 4 hours in the car without it) it seems a little remiss on my part. It’s one of my favorites for so many reasons. It’s a little longer than some of the others, so Fiona didn’t like to read it for a long time, but now she’s (clearly) loving it.
The first reason I love it is it’s so easy to read. Most Dr. Seuss books (with the exception of the ones that are tricky on purpose like Fox in Socks) are easy to read aloud and Sneetches is written in near perfect iambic hexameter. Honestly, it should be used in introductory poetry classes to teach the concept, it’s so spot on. The second reason is, of course, the lessons implicit in nearly all the stories in this book. The Sneetches is the best known, and probably the most obvious as it’s the only one that comes out and says:
“The day they decided that Sneetches are Sneetches
And no kind of Sneetch is the best on the beaches
That day, all the Sneetches forgot about stars
And whether they had one, or not, upon thars.”
Which is so true and applicable in the world right now. But there are three other stories in the book and 2 of them also have incredibly subtle lessons embedded (it’s possible that the third does as well, as it has taken me this long to process the lesson in The Zax).
“What was I scared of”, the last story in the book is about a character who meets a pair of pants that walks on their own and is scared of them until he finds out that pants are scared of him as well. What I like about this story is that it’s scary without being too scary. A pair of pale green pants is not really that scary, so it brings the point home nicely.
The Zax is the story of a North Going Zax and a South Going Zax who bump into each other and refuse to move to either side and, eventually a highway is built around them. It wasn’t until we started reading it everyday that I picked up the lesson here: Spend your time refusing to budge and the whole world will move on with out you.
“Too Many Daves” is just a funny little exercise in rhyme and word play. It may also be a warning not to give all 23 of your children the same name. But I’m not sure that’s a universal lesson.