Hop on Pop

Hop on Pop by Dr. Seuss

The Hop on Pop board book appears a little bit shorter than the regular book. (Though it has been a while since I have read the original.) There is no "story", just a bunch of simple words that rhyme to make funny scenes.

The Amelia Bedelia Treasury: Three Books by Peggy Parish

The Amelia Bedelia Treasury: Three Books by Peggy Parish by Peggy Parish (Author), Fritz Siebel (Illustrator), Barbara Siebel Thomas (Illustrator)

Amelia Bedelia (1963)

Thank You, Amelia Bedelia (1964)

Amelia Bedelia and the Surprise Shower (1966)

These are the first Amelia Bedelia book. She takes everything literally and gets in all sorts of trouble because of it. However, she is also a great cook, and the delicious food always manages to save her. The third book is a bit different. Here, it is the literal understanding of "shower" and the spray with water that helps cure a headache. The food is incidental. These originals are better than the derivatives.

Clifford the Big Red Dog

Clifford the Big Red Dog by Norman Bridwell

The first Clifford book started the series. There is not much narrative. Instead there are just various tales of Clifford. He has a doghouse as big as a house. He accidentally "catches" a car when he is chasing it. He needs a rake to comb his hair. There are a lot of "big dog" things that make things challenging for him. He is also a good guard dog. Many of these things have been developed further, but this is the original.

The Complete Adventures of Curious George

The Complete Adventures of Curious George: 70th Anniversary Edition by H. A. Rey and Margret Rey

Curious George (1941)

Curious George Takes a Job (1947)

Curious George Rides a Bike (1952)

Curious George Gets a Medal (1957)

Curious George Flies a Kite (1958)

Curious George Learns the Alphabet (1963)

Curious George Goes to the Hospital (1966)

This collection has all the original Curious George books. They are of a higher quality than the newer stories by other authors. They also have various elements that would not be considered appropriate today. In the first book, George is found by the Man with the Yellow Hat in Africa. He smokes a pipe and then eagerly goes to the zoo. In all the books, George gets in trouble in various ways due to his curiosity. However, he always manages to get out of the trouble - often by using some of the same skills that got him in trouble in the first place.

These stories are quite old. Some look data. In Curious George Gets a Medal, George is the first animal to bail out of a rocket in space. This was before the space program had really taken off. In others, they just show a time of the past. In Curious George Rides a Bike, George gets a bike that he rides around. He later takes over a friends paper route, breaks his bike, and then joins an animal circus. He gets banished from the circus, then rescues a bear and gets to join. Everyone in the town knows each other and forgives him for not delivering their papers.

While he sometimes seems to be in a bucolic small town, other times he is in the middle of a big city. However, everyone still seems to know each other.

The collection includes CDs that include the audiobook versions of the stories. These include background music for almost the entire time.

The "Learns the Alphabet" was my least favorite. It seemed to be too slow and the pictures formed with letters was forced. For my favorite, I'd pick the first, though the early ones were all good.

I Wish that I had Duck Feet

I Wish that I had Duck Feet by Theo. LeSieg (Dr. Seuss), illustrated by B Tobey

A boy wishes he had duck feets and imagines how he would use them. Then he realizes the problems. He pivots to think of various other animal appendages the same way. Finally, he thinks of what it would be like to have all of them as a "which-what-who". This doesn't turn out too well. He finally realizes he was fine just as himself.

The words have a great rhythm and rhyme as they tell a good story. The pictures add significantly with the rival boy and the "crush" girl playing good supporting roles.

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima

A middle-school boy's father has been dead for 5 years. His mother meets a sailor and they have a brief fling before he sets sail. When the sailor returns, he stays. They plan on getting married. The sailor tries to befriend the boy. However, the boy is not the innocent they think he is. He has a peephole where he has spied on his mother's sexual activities. He also hangs out with a group of friends that have an intellectual spin on depravity. They brutally murder and dissect cats and plan on doing the same to the sailor. (They will soon turn 14 and Japanese law does not allow those under 14 to be punished.)

The book seems to tap into some of the same youthful angst as Catcher in the Rye. The book is short and uses fairly flowery language. (Is this from the original, or just the translation?) Some of the content can be downright disgusting. These seemingly "good" kids have been lead down a horrible path by their "chief". 

Cat's Cradle

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Cat's Cradle is one of Vonnegut's better books. The audiobook also includes a brief interview with the author, though that does not add much to the book. 

The story centers around an author who is trying to write a book about the experience of the nuclear bomb. He contacts the children of the scientist behind the bomb and asks what their experience was when the bomb went off. He received responses and got to know the family better. We learn that the scientist was a rather peculiar man. His wife and children also had their strange traits. The scientist had also been asked by the marines to invent something so they would not have to fight in mud. He had actually done it, though he had not widely shared it. This was "ice-9" a substance that is a "seed" that changes the crystallization and melting point of water, and can pretty much caused instantaneous freezing. Each of his children had a small amount. This would lead to the end of the world. 

The novel also ventures off to a nation where all religion is banned, especially the "national" religion. This religion is quite quirky and extremely contradictory. The leader of the company is on his death bed and a seemingly random outsider is asked to be leader. Leadership pays well and comes with dictatorial responsibilities, but nobody wants it. However, the old leader dies with ice-9 and most of the world gets iced over. The few survivors can survive by melting off ice.

There is some crazy science here (which is not fully explained) as well as plenty of social commentary, and just plaine zaniness.

Bell Jar

I read a biography of Plath before reading The Bell Jar. It is difficult to determine where real life ends and fiction begins. It feels the book is a "pure" autobiography. Names of others have been changed to allow her to put out her true feelings without regards to the actual facts. 

Bell Jar is the first person story of Ester Greenwood as you transitions from a happy girl turning into a sad woman. She worked hard in school and was able to get a great scholarship to college. By continuing to work hard in college, she got a highly coveted internship. However, once she got that, she realized this was not the life she wanted to live. However, she had no idea what life she did want to live. She tried dating. Nothing was meaningful. She held out a bit of hope for a childhood friend. Alas, she was dejected when she learned he had lost his virginity to a slutty waitress. She tried suicide. She ended up in a mental hospital. She later decided to lose her virginity in a rather meaningless way. She didn't enjoy it and hemorrhaged, necessitating a trip to the ER.  One of her friends that appeared to be doing better did commit suicide. 

Her life was a cautionary tale. One can appear to follow all the walls to make it through our educational institutions but be ill-prepared for the life afterwards. It is also an indictment of the quality and benefits of our mental health facilities. 

Tartuffe

Tartuffe was one of Moliere most popular - and most banned - works. It centers around a pious charlatan, Tartuffe. He has ingratiated himself with a well-to-do family. They have taken him in after seeing his difficult circumstances. They grant him all of his material needs and respect his opinions. However, the younger generation does not share this respect. This is especially bad after the father promises his daughter to Tartuffe (even though she is already planning on marrying somebody else.) They eventually plot to uncover Tartuffe in making advances to the woman of the house. The plot works and they throw Tartuffe out. However, Tartuffe gets the last laugh as the family has given him a strongbox and signed away the house to him. (This was in part to escape a possible difficult situation.) Tartuffe attempts to evict the family. Luckily, some officials are aware of Tartuffe's activities and arrest him, thereby rescuing the family.

Like many other Moliere comedies, this deals with the comedy of different people communicating on different levels. There is also a wedding and the shenanigans that almost result in the breakup of the wedding. Luckily, everything works out in the end.

Planet of the Apes

The book was written in the 1960s. It is told as a framing story, with some apes discovering a "message in a bottle" floating in space that tells the story of the voyage to a distant planet and the discovery of the ape society. Here it turns out that the planet once held a human society, but the humans got lazy and eventually the apes took over. The apes were good at imitating, but not so good at original thought. Thus their society had remained largely identical to the human society that it supplanted 10,000 years earlier. The humans had remained, but reverted to a savage state, wandering around naked, and not speaking or communicating. Of the three humans that arrived on the ape planet, one was killed by the apes as part of a hunting adventure and two were brought in to captivity. Of the two captives, one totally reverted to the beast state, not even engaging in conversation with the other man. The other man exposed himself as a man. He acheived noteriety and entered the ape society. However, when it was discovered that he had impregnated another human "beast", plans her made to exterminate him. With the help of some friendly apes, they escaped in their ship to planet earth, arriving 700 years after they had left. There they find earth largely as they had left it 700 years earlier, except now apes were in control.

This is largely a cautionary tale about laziness and degeneracy. Man doesn't take time to exersize his mind or body, and lets others do his work. Eventually, the apes decide they have had enough and take over. Since they are merely copying what existed before, they are no more than apes themselves. The real apes have no problem taking over and doing the copying on their own.

In the most recent movie, (Rise of Planet of the Apes), the cause is switched. Instead of man's laziness, it becomes man's excess intervention that is the downfall. The chemical that helps give the apes intelligence is rushed into trials without sufficient testing. While it does make the apes brilliant, it quickly kills humans. This gradually spreads around the world, leading to ape control.

In the earlier movies there were alternate causes. In the Tim Burton movie, experimental animals from the space ship led to the dawn of the ape civilization. (However, when the humans return to earth, they find a similar "ape society" there.)

In the Charleton Heston version, the ape planet is earth of the distant future. Here the human society had fully decayed and the apes had taken over. It seems to de-emphasize the laziness aspect, and focus on the decay. Could this be the few years that intervened? Could it be the change in the few years, from the early 60s of postwar complacency in France to the late 60s cultural revolution in the United States?

Podkayne of Mars

After going through some "heavy" books this is a refreshing relief. Podkayne is the diary of a human adolescent who grew up on Mars. Heinlein wrote it during the "bridge" portion of his career, near the tail-end of his juvenile period. Thus, he wrote a lot of what he wanted, but didn't get too "out there" as he managed to do in his later career. Podkayne has always wanted to be a starship captain. However, she had not traveled far from earth, and as a girl she felt disadvantaged. She also had a things for babies. (And she got experience with her family having young triplets.) Her younger brother is an early adolescent who is a technical whiz, but always causes trouble. The two of them get to go on a big journey with their uncle, a Martian politician. They get to ride first class. We follow them along on the journeys and experience the social hierarchy of the ship, the challenges with a radiation storm, and the vastly different culture of Venus. (Think Las Vegas owned by a single corporation.)

Then suddenly we find out the uncle is on a secret mission, there is a kidnapping, a giant bomb goes off and the story ends.

The end seems to come on much too suddenly. Did Heinlein just tire of the book? The end ties together many pieces from earlier, but it seems to be forced. I can see him saying: "I'm bored. Rather than continue this exploration, I'm just going to throw in the action sequence here and call it a day."
In Heinlein's original version, the bomb kills her. In the version here (made "happier" at the request of his original publisher), she is seriously wounded. This, however, is just the last few paragraphs. And for the story, it hardly matters which one is used. It is the few pages before this where Heinlein seems to have given up.
On the audiobook, the narrator fit's the book perfectly. She has just enough of a juvenile bubliness to make it feel like the character Podkayne.

The Selected Stories of Philip K Dick Volume 2

This collections contains the following stories:
Colony
Upon the dull earth
The short happy life of the brown oxford
Faith of our fathers
The days of perky Pat
The variable man
I hope I shall arrive soon

Many of the stories deal with a post-apocalyptic world.  The Variable Man is the longest. In it, earth is planning to use a special faster-than-light bomb to defeat some intergalatic overlords.  The leaders depend on an odds machine to calculate the chance of winning. Unfortunately, another experiment accidentally brings a man from the early 1900s to the current day. This throws the odds all out of wack. The leaders try to have him destroyed. However, the scientist in charge of bomb-making "saves" him to assist him in the effort. Unfortunately for earth, this causes the bomb to fail to detonate, and the earthlings lose the battle. Fortunately, this also unlocked the key to faster-than-light travel, and now the earthlings can span the universe.


In Perky Pat (1963), most of the earth has been leveled, with a few people left. The adults spend all day playing a "doll" game, Perky Pat.  Some people discover that a nearby group has a different doll. They compete and win, but from that they are shunned out of town.

In Colony (1953), a planet is seen to be perfectly benign. Then inanimate objects start to attack. A local lifeform disguises itself as these objects to then consume humans. They think that the solution is to either annihilte themselves and the planet or try to escape without any inanimate objects. Since they will be naked, they ask for an unmanned spaceship to rescue them. It comes earlier then expected and they all board. Later we hear of the real ship coming and not finding anybody.  (And we wonder - did the lifeform sneak back to earth on the ship?)

"I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon" (1980) deals with a man who cannot fall asleep during a long-distance space journey. He becomes tourmented with his childhood memories of persumed animal cruelity.

"Upon the Dull Earth" (1954), a girl is "taken" too soon. She comes back, but then consumes everyone else, destroying her universe.

In "Faith of Our Fathers" (1967), the great leader turns out to be an alien form that most people see as an old man. The main character takes an anti-hulucinatory drug to see him as who he is. It is not pleasant, and he thinks of him as good and evil.

In "The short happy life of the brown oxford" (1954), an "animator" is used to turn inanimate things alive. A shoe is turned alive, and then uses the machine to turn a girl shoe alive for it.

While the stories seem to espouse many sentiments of the time they were written. However, the stories provide some interesting fodder for thought - especially in the realm of human relationships.

Amelia Bedelia Treasury

Amelia Bedelia interprets every request literally. This makes for jolly good fun at first, though it starts to get tiring after a few reads. This book consolidates three early Amelia Bedelia books. The first book stands on its own very well. The next two are obviously derivative. They employ the same literal-speaking misunderstandings, but seem to lack the originality and spunk of the first one. (The "misunderstandings" also become more of a stretch.)

I'm also a little curious about the illustrations. The pictures are copyrighted by Fritz Siebel, yet the illustration byline of the second two books goes to Barbara Siebel Thomas - after the drawings of Fritz Siebel. I'm not sure what this means. Perhaps he drew black some drawings and she colored them?