Dr Seuss's The Seven Lady Godivas

Dr Seuss's The Seven Lady Godivas

A banner on the cover proclaims:

"The true facts concerning history's barest family"

"Foreward

"History has treated no name so shabbily as it has the name Godiva.

"Today Lady Godiva brings to mind a shameful picture — a big blond nude trotting around the town on a horse. In the background of this picture, there is always Peeping Tom, an illicit snooper with questionable intentions.

"The author feels that the time has come to speak:

"There was not one; there were Seven Lady Godivas,
and their nakedness actually was not a thing of
shame. So far as Peeping Tom is concerned, he never
really peeped. ''Peeping'' was merely the old family
name, and Tom and his six brothers bore it with
pride.

"A beautiful story of love, honor and scientific achievement has too long been gathering dust in the archives.

"Dr. Seuss
"Coventry, 1939"

(Chapter one — chaters are unnumbered)

"Old Lord Godiva

"On the fifteenth of May in the year
1066, Lord Godiva, Earl of all Coventry,
summoned his daughters to appear before
him in the Great North Hall of the Castle
Godiva.

"For a long silent moment he regarded them proudly, for the seven daughters of Lord Godiva had brains. Nowhere, he thought with satisfaction, could there be a group of young ladies that wasted less time upon frivol and froth. No fluffy-duff primping, no feather, no fuss. They were simply themselves and chose not to disguise it.

"''Girls,'' announced Lord Godiva, ''today I leave for the Battle of Hastings. And,'' he added calmly, ''I'm going by horseback.''

"Horseback!

"The sisters looked nervously from one to anotheer. In that day in England, the horse was not taken lightly. True, Lord Godiva had been experimenting with these animals for years. But the horse remaind a mystery, unbroken in spirit, a contrary beast full of wiles and surprises.

"''Come, come,'' chided Lord Godiva, rattling his spurs. ''Don't be so old-fashioned. This is 1066! Definitely, I shall attend the battle on horseback.''"

...

(No page numbers, it goes on like that for about eighty pages, alternating a page of text and a page with a picture. Oh, Lord Godiva dies about two pages further in, killed by his horse. And the total explanation for why all the seven sisters, and only them, are always through sun and snow in the nude is in that line "chose not to disguise it."

(This is the rare Dr Seuss book aimed at adults, humorously spinning a yarn of where "horse truths" like "Don't change horses mid-stream" come from. The sisters have a pact to research horses before they can marry, and each finds one and then runs off with a brother Peeping.

(My quoted text preserves, modulo typos on my part, punctuation and line breaks in the book. Italics I leave out. I was using the 1987 reprint — "Re-Issued by Multitudinous Demand" it reads on the cover.)

Final thought: only one Lady is blond, mom isn't here and the Lord is bald with a white beard

Although written for an adult audience, it's less of an "adult" book than say, The Curious Sofa by Edward Gorey. I wouldn't read it to my kids (I expeect they would get bored) but I wouldn't worry about them flipping through it. All of the nudity is Barbie nudity: no nipples and no pudenda. It's funny, but not a lot so. If not for the Dr. Seuss connection, it wouldn't be worth a mention.

Final thought: The Curious Sofa is very funny, but only very suggestive, not explicit

books for young readers

Swallows and Amazons, a long series, along with many other boating books (Stowaway by Karen Hesse and Carry on, Mr. Bowditch by Jean Lee Lathan come to mind) were enjoyed by my eldest, but are probably still too high a reading level.

The Swallows and Amazons stuff is also about indepence. My Side of the Mountain goes hand in hand with that. The Rosemary Sutcliff books about ancient Romans (The Lantern Bearers, The Eagle of the Ninth, etc) have a bit of that, too, but also get into the historical fiction that boy liked.

Some of the Edith Nesbit books, like The Magic City and Half Magic might work. Those are out of copyright so you can find and print a chapter to decide if you like them.

There's some Philip Pullman stuff that's easier to read than the His Dark Materials series (The Golden Compass, et. al.), things like Clockwork. The story structure of Clockwork is itself interesting. Sort-of a "Don't sell your soul to the machine because the machine will cash that chip in."

The Mennyms

Some years ago I read Ascending Peculiarity, which is a collection of interviews and profiles of Edward Gorey culled from magazines. In one of them Gorey mentions that The Mennyms books are worth reading.

The books are by Sylvia Waugh and are about a family of life-sized rag dolls. These dolls move and talk and live their lives, which at first seems a bit juvenile. But the dolls are fully aware of their unusual nature and spend quite a bit of effort managing their lives so as not to arouse the suspicions of the humans around them. And they are concerned with the metaphysics of their own existence which gives the books a hook to interest an adult reader.

The first book, The Mennyms, starts when the dolls have been alive for about forty years. The are three generations living in one household, with another woman who lives in a closet but pretends to be a neighbor. Sir Magnus is the bed-ridden patriarch who makes a living writing history articles for magazines. His wife, Tulip is the accountant of the family and makes sells knitwear to retailers by post. Vinetta and Joshua are middle generation of the Mennyms, and Miss Quigley is a friend of Vinetta. Joshua has a job as night watchman, a low paid position, but the hours and loneliness of the job are vital to his staying unrecognized. Vinetta is a stay at home mom with two "teenagers", "ten-year-old" twins, and a baby.

This youngest generation have the most quirks, starting with their names. Soobie is the eldest, a blue-skinned boy who spends most of his time reading and has the least tolerance for the "pretends" of the rest of the family. Appleby a teen girl a little younger than Soobie. She is the most realistic looking of the family and gets sent out for most of the shopping and post office errands. In contrast to Soobie, she is the most interested in the "pretends". Poopie, a boy, and Wimpey, a girl, are the twins. The baby is named Googles.

Life at 5 Brucklehurst Grove consists of pretending to be real, which involves some real activities like cleaning, washing, and paying bills. They live in the house that had belonged to the woman who made them, and they maintain the utilities so that they may have electricity and water for their cleaning and pretends and a phone to avoid face to face contact in their business.

Plus there a great many pretend activities that start with eating and drinking. No one ever grows, and children remain children in judgement, so everyone just pretends to always be the same age. Appleby, for example, spends part of each year as fifteen and part as sixteen. Soobie, least realistic in looks, is most realistic in attitude, takes part in few pretends — he never joins the meals — and breaks taboos like complaining about the pretend notion that Miss Quigley lives on Trevewick Street instead of the hall closet. The teenage judgement and attitude of Appleby is a source of many of the conflicts that arise.

This first book also introduces a new character that springs to life at a time when Appleby is near death. These events first introduce the characters' attempts to come to terms with their metaphysics. At one point Soobie ends up in church and thinks a mental prayer that at once is agnostic and soul searching. Later books introduce complete death and more complete understanding of themselves.

It's an engaging series that works well for tweens or as lighter fare for adults.

Final thought: Ascending Peculiarity is also a good read

Rootabagas.

"So far? So early? So soon?" asked the ticket agent wiping more sleep out of his eyes. "Then I will give you a new ticket. It blew in. It is a long slick leather slab ticket with a blue spanch across it."

— How They Broke Away to Go to the Rootabaga Country by Carl Sandburg

But let's start at the beginning.

How They Broke Away to Go to the Rootabaga Country

Gimme the Ax lived in a house where everything is the same as it always was.

"The chimney sits on top of the house and lets the smoke out," said Gimme the Ax. "The doorknobs open the doors. The windows are always either open or shut. We are always either upstairs or downstairs in this house. Everything is the same as it always was."

So he decided to let his children name themselves.

"The first words they speak as soon as they learn to make words shall be their names," he said. "They shall name themselves."

When the first boy came to the house of Gimme the Ax, he was named Please Gimme. When the first girl came she was named Ax Me No Questions.

And both of the children had the shadows of valleys by night in their eyes and the lights of early morning, when the sun is coming up, on their foreheads.

And the hair on top of their heads was a dark wild grass. And they loved to turn the doorknobs, open the doors, and run out to have the wind comb their hair and touch their eyes and put its six soft fingers on their foreheads.

And then because no more boys came and no more girls came, Gimme the Ax said to himself, "My first boy is my last and my last girl is my first and they picked their names themselves."

It's start of the first of the Rootabaga Stories by Carl Sandburg.

Final thought: Sandburg has also written adult fare, but the kids stuff is great