Hop on Pop

This is basically one of those word list books. Apparently Dr. Seuss wrote them, too. It's kind of on the same lines as "I'll Teach My Dog 100 Words" except Seuss's word list rhymes, which is about the only way you can get through one of these without falling asleep. In some places, it focuses on opposites and prepositions and things like that. Some of it's goofy and the illustrations make it a bit more interesting than the average word book, like the one for "HE ME He is after me. HIM JIM Jim is after him." Below those words, there's an illustration of a man being bitten in the toe by something that looks sort of like a lion, and then the lion is being bitten in the tail by a little boy ("Jim") who looks very angry. And it's got Mr. Brown in it, from before he got his own book ("Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You?"). But it's still rather boring and not very useful.

The back of the book says, "A collection of hilarious nonsense which makes sense in its ability to teach children to read and understand the use of words and phrases." I guess it's helpful to beginning readers that the main words are in capital letters before they're used in mixed-case sentences. But mostly it's nonsensical without being interesting. It feels like it wasn't edited very well. For instance, the last page is "SAY SAY What does this say?" and then there's a box which has the words in it: "seehemewe", "patpuppop", "hethreetreebee", and "tophopstop". Underneath the box, it says, "Ask me tomorrow, but not today." What? What is the purpose of that page? It's almost like Seuss was coming up with random ideas and his editor was afraid of suggesting that the famous author should skip the useless ones. It seems like including fake words would be confusing if the purpose is to teach children to read. Sure, they're combinations of real words, probably ones from earlier in the book, but even the narrator gives up on trying to make any sense of them.