A publisher’s note at the end of “Pet” explains that Dr. It’s an amiable stroll through Seussdom that might have seemed extraordinary if Dr. Good news: “What Pet Should I Get?” won’t retroactively ruin your childhood.

Not just because it’s in the unsettling category of posthumous literary discoveries, which tend to have been unpublished for a reason, but because of its proximity to the publication of Harper Lee’s “Go Set a Watchman,” which surprised everybody not by failing to live up to the greatness of “To Kill a Mockingbird” but by managing to undo the greatness of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” for some. (As a friend with a young son said to me recently, “The ‘Fox in Socks’ tweetle-beetle-battle riff always makes me feel funnier than I am.”) The announcement of the publication, next Tuesday, of a new, long-lost Seuss book, “What Pet Should I Get?,” has been cause for celebration, and a little anxiety. They made reading feel like a game you wanted to play, or a joke you wanted to be able to tell. Seuss’s books have given millions of kids that freedom-the dizzying joy of literacy. Suddenly I could read_,_ and I began to read other books, and everything I saw around me, out loud: “black pepper,” “NO SWIMMING,” “Herbie Rides Again.” It was like the moment, years later, when I rode my bike without training wheels: I pedalled unsteadily at first, then faster and freer I turned around to smile at my uncle, whom I’d asked to spot me, and saw that he was on the other side of the parking lot.ĭr.

During my experience with it as a young child, I crossed over from being read to, chanting along with the bounce and jump of the words that matched the bounce and jump of the kids on the page, to distinguishing the shapes and sounds of the words and then to reading the book myself, the words short and rat-a-tat, fun and available to me. We like to hop on top of Pop.”) It also taught me how to read. Seuss book “Hop on Pop”-“the Simplest Seuss for Youngest Use”-is a whirlwind of staccato delights: a pup in a cup Red, Ned, Ted, and Ed in bed and the titular hop. “What Pet Should I Get?” is an amiable stroll through Seussdom that might have seemed extraordinary if Dr.

Hop and pop dr seuss