Actually this belongs in the " you know you’re getting old when…" thread.
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my oldest was reading Anne Rice at 13
I’m not following the relevance of your comment, unless it belongs in the random thoughts thread.
Pretty sure her point is the fact someone young enough to be reading Harry Potter as a child has been working for at least 9 years makes those of us who were already adults when the first book was published feel old.
Now if you said your daughter had been working for 9 years when the first Anne Rice novel was published …
wtf are you talking about???
This is a thread on banned books. I am responding to what is appropriate at a middle school age.
I don’t care about what tangent you feel people should be responding too.
(Psst…, pz was responding to a post from June, not the one sv just made)
You know you’re getting old when your child starts banning your grandchild from books that you didn’t think were racist at all.
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My bad, for some reason I saw twig’s icon and thought you were responding to the post immediately preceding yours. No clue why I thought that was twig’s post.
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My favorite Dr Seuss book is one of the ones they stopped publishing. There’s one depiction of a Middle Eastern man, and it’s Dr Seuss, so yeah, it’s a caricature… all of Dr. Seuss drawings essentially are. The main characters are admiring a possession of his… doesn’t seem especially offensive, but 
.
Seems like they could remove that one page or even just air-brush the man out of the picture and the rest of the book would still be great without it, but that’s not what happened.
(Book is On Beyond Zebra and I assume the objectionable part is the depiction of the Nazzim of Bazzim.)
Might have just been not popular enough? I don’t think I’ve read it, despite having 20 or so Seuss books, including a few of the other discontinued ones.
Sounds like a good idea for a book though.
We read On Beyond Zebra to our girls when they were young. We and they liked it, but it would not have been the favorite for any of us.
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Well they took about 7 or 8 books out of print for PC reasons (forget exactly how it was described) and it was one of those. It was my standard baby shower gift and practically every mother wrote back to say it was their kid’s favorite. I agree it’s lesser-known, but it was absolutely his best book.
Said Conrad Cornelius o’Donald o’Dell,
My very young friend who is learning to spell:
“The A is for Ape. And B is for Bear.
The C is for Camel. The H is for Hare
The M is for Mouse. And the R is for Rat.”
“I know all the twenty-six letters like that…
… Through to Z is for Zebra. I know them all well.”
Said Conrad Cornelius o’Donald o’Dell.
“So now I know everything anyone knows.
From beginning to end. From the start to the close.
Because Z is as far as the alphabet goes.”
He reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q. Here, stopping for one moment by the stone urn which held the geraniums, he saw, but now far, far away, like children picking up shells, divinely innocent and occupied with little trifles at their feet and somehow entirely defenceless against a doom which he perceived, his wife and son, together, in the window. They needed his protection; he gave it them. But after Q? What comes next? After Q there are a number of letters the last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the distance. Z is only reached once by one man in a generation. Still, if he could reach R it would be something. Here at least was Q. He dug his heels in at Q. Q he was sure of. Q he could demonstrate. If Q then is Q—R—. Here he knocked his pipe out, with two or three resonant taps on the handle of the urn, and proceeded. “Then R . . . ” He braced himself. He clenched himself.
Qualities that would have saved a ship’s company exposed on a broiling sea with six biscuits and a flask of water—endurance and justice, foresight, devotion, skill, came to his help. R is then—what is R?
A shutter, like the leathern eyelid of a lizard, flickered over the intensity of his gaze and obscured the letter R. In that flash of darkness he heard people saying—he was a failure—that R was beyond him. He would never reach R. On to R, once more. R—
Qualities that in a desolate expedition across the icy solitudes of the Polar region would have made him the leader, the guide, the counsellor, whose temper, neither sanguine nor despondent, surveys with equanimity what is to be and faces it, came to his help again. R—
The lizard’s eye flickered once more. The veins on his forehead bulged. The geranium in the urn became startlingly visible and, displayed among its leaves, he could see, without wishing it, that old, that obvious distinction between the two classes of men; on the one hand the steady goers of superhuman strength who, plodding and persevering, repeat the whole alphabet in order, twenty-six letters in all, from start to finish; on the other the gifted, the inspired who, miraculously, lump all the letters together in one flash—the way of genius. He had not genius; he laid no claim to that: but he had, or might have had, the power to repeat every letter of the alphabet from A to Z accurately in order. Meanwhile, he stuck at Q. On, then, on to R.
Feelings that would not have disgraced a leader who, now that the snow has begun to fall and the mountain top is covered in mist, knows that he must lay himself down and die before morning comes, stole upon him, paling the colour of his eyes, giving him, even in the two minutes of his turn on the terrace, the bleached look of withered old age. Yet he would not die lying down; he would find some crag of rock, and there, his eyes fixed on the storm, trying to the end to pierce the darkness, he would die standing. He would never reach R.
He stood stock-still, by the urn, with the geranium flowing over it. How many men in a thousand million, he asked himself, reach Z after all? Surely the leader of a forlorn hope may ask himself that, and answer, without treachery to the expedition behind him, “One perhaps.”