'Fess up - what children's books make you groan? - Page 9

[boingo82]

Originally Posted by loraxc

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I maintain that I was warped forever by a collection of Hans Christian Anderson stories, unaltered and faithfully translated, that we had when I was a girl. SO sad and creepy, and every single inanimate object has feelings. To this day I cannot throw away the Christmas tree without feeling terrible.
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I had a little set of those. Gotta love the little matchstick girl who is out selling matches on the cold winter street to survive, and she freezes/starves to death.

[boingo82]

The only one we have now that we really hate is Baby Mickey's Bedtime.
The whole little thing is about baby Mickey giving himself a bath, getting himself a bottle, tucking himself into bed, etc. There are no parents anywhere in it, he seems like he's been completely abandoned.

[LizD]

Nursery Rhymes are really important, IMO. Their origins are very interesting and those rhymes plus Grimm's fairy tales bring the children a lot of important archetypes in a very satisfying way. Children are *relieved* when the witch has to dance to death in red-hot shoes. There's a great book called Heavy Words Lightly Thrown: The Reason Behind the Rhyme which goes into the origins of a lot of these.

I love Dr Seuss (and most of the classics dissed here- I mostly hate modern boring "educational" stories and there's so many *bad* books being published these days) and if you read his bio you might too! Very interesting. Don't try to play Scrabble after reading Dr Seuss to your kids all day- you will think you've got a seven-letter triple word score with "abimoxy" or adding "derbooz" as a suffix of "van!"

[pammysue]

Originally Posted by nikirj

It goes MUCH more smoothly if you take a good pause after the word "cow". So it goes "Goodnight cow...jumping over the moon". I have actually always LIKED that particular set of lines.

I just realized that I put in that pause subconsciously. Those lines are my favorite part of Goodnight Moon (probably my favorite children's books for many reasons).

[solstar]

Mr. Seahorse. We got it from the library and I was about to spontaneously combust if I had to read it again!

[MerelyGod]

Originally Posted by catnip

Ans I love "The Lorax" for grown ups, but not for little kids please.

OK, now I love The Lorax and DD1 loved it when she was younger. When she was 3 or so, everytime we saw a tree stump, she climb up on it and say "I am the Lorax, I speak for the trees!"

I can't stand If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. It drives me CRAZY! It's OK to say no!

And The Rainbow Fish, ugh! We got that one from the library and read it once before returning it. I agree, how creepy.

I also hate, with a book burning passion, any of the Disney books. They're books that are based on movies, THAT WERE BASED ON BOOKS in the first place! How can you write a book like that? The Winnie the Pooh ones are definitely the worst. The originals are so charming, but Disney turns Christopher Robin into a snotty brat and poor, simple Pooh into a complete idiot.

And those dumb little board books with absolutely no content. Like, what's the point? To me, board books are just durable versions of stories we like, but now all these little books are out and there is absolutely nothing to them. I just don't get it.

And I guess I'm in the minority on this, but I hate the cleaned up versions of fables and fairy tales. I won't read them if the stories have been changed. If it's not age appropriate, then we'll skip it until she's older.

I also love The Giving Tree, and just about anything by Dr. Seuss. Goodnight Moon is one of my favorites. I mean, "goodnight nobody, goodnight mush" is genius!

[Lazyhead]

i hate the usual suspects--clifford, curious george (weirdly colonialist for sure) & babar. we had a babar book in which celeste (babar's wife) has babies. first of all, babar can't deal with situation so he goes and sits on a mountaintop while his wife is in labor. he abandons her basically. and THEN celeste's doctor weighs her babies and says they aren't gaining enough weight and that celeste will need to start supplementing. i pre-read a bag of books my mom gave my dd and that one i just threw across the room in disgust.

[KC in KS]

Just Say Moo!

You've probably never heard of it - I can't even find it anywhere on line to show you.

But this book is my lesson in always, always prereading books before I give them to DD. I picked this one up in a used bookstore, because it had a cute fuzzy cow face on the cover and when you push his nose, he moos. Perfect for not-yet-one, right?

Now that we've read it (a few hundred times), DH and I refer to it as The Communist Cow.

See, there's this baby calf, and one day he goes walking through the barnyard. He meets three different animals. In each case the animal makes it's correct sound (the duck goes "quack") and so the calf goes "quack back". He then gets scolded, "No, no, you must moo!".

The book ends like this "The cow, who'd grown wiser by now, did what all cows like to do. He said Moo!"

Poor little quadralingual calf is forced into conformity with community expectations of his species by constant peer pressure.

DH does do a really funny version with characters like Comrade Duck. LOL

KC

[captain optimism]

Originally Posted by Mama Faery

Frog and Toad are DH's favorite stories of all time. But I think Toad is a jerk.

I love Toad. I love his exclamations. I love the way he's so insecure. It's a good thing, too, because my son adores those books. I have read them all, many times.

He'll ask for anything by Arnold Lobel, including that intensely stupid book about the Owl. (Or as my son says it, "owl-oh.") There's nothing wrong with the book, it's age-appropriate, I just don't like it.

Because he likes Frog and Toad, my son wants to read any book in that beginning reader series. The one about the puppy who eats pizza , the one about the anteater and Halloween : or any book whose cover art is on the back of one of the other books.

One thing that bugs me is when there is a book like Peter Rabbit, Winnie the Pooh or The Wind in the Willows, and some publisher puts out an abridged version with new illustrations. Hello! the point is that Beatrix Potter was a clever writer and a brilliant illustrator! Why the bleepin' bleep would I want to read my kid a book called Peter Rabbit with abridged text and some other bunnies in the pictures?

Don't even get me started about the fake Winnie-the-Pooh.

I've been pretty lucky, though. There aren't too many books that he loves that I can't stand. There was one week when we went to the library and randomly picked out five books about children who don't want to eat healthy food. I'm not sure how that happened.