Reading to your kids is the apple eating of parenting. It’s easy, it’s enjoyable, it’s good for everybody involved, and, assuming all goes well, it guarantees you a solid dose of that good glowy feeling that comes from doing something healthy or educational or otherwise good for you and/or other people. “Look, I’m eating an apple. It’s delicious. I’m being so healthy right now. Oh look, I’m reading to my children. I’m such an amazing parent. This is doing so much good for my child and for our relationship. Good Lord, I deserve a cookie. Where are the cookies? Shit, we’re out of cookies. Guess I’ll have to settle for a beer.” It’s so easy in fact, if there were a score being kept for all this parenting stuff (there’s not, is there?), then reading should barely even count as a credit. You should just lose credit for not doing it.
But now I’ve got myself wondering, what kind of beer would pair well with Dr. Seuss?
All that being said, I’ll admit it: there are times when reading to my boyos is not as enjoyable as others. Perhaps the two of them are having a hard time taking turns with the book selection, each of them insisting that the world will come to its end if the piece of literature currently clutched in their hands is not given voice right this instant. Perhaps the two-year old isn’t interested in the story and would rather throw things at me while I attempt to not lose any more parenting points. Or perhaps the material that they’ve selected is, shall we say, not exactly my plate of green eggs and ham. Case in point: the collection of paperbacks that I like to call The Hippie Books.
Or as they’re officially called, The Serendipity Books, a series of children’s books written by Stephen Cosgrove and illustrated by Robin James in the 70’s and 80’s. Considering how many books were in this series and the fact that they’re still available for purchase, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of them. Like me, you might have even read them when you were a kid. I had a shelf full of these things, which my mom dutifully preserved and passed off to me when I became a dad so that now my kids have a shelf full of them. Each book features an animal or a mythical creature facing some kind of quandary, and by the end they manage to learn a valuable lesson which, in case you missed it over the course of the entire story, is reiterated on the last page. In verse no less. There’s the sheep who’s jealous of his best friend the unicorn because he’s a unicorn and he’s got that awesome horn sticking out of his head. There’s the vulture that learns to laugh and cry from an emo jackrabbit. There’s the morbidly obese cat that learns all about eating right and exercise from a mouse. There’s the floppy-eared bunny that comes to accept his floppy-earedness. And of course, the fire-breathing dragon that learns to be responsible about his muffin-munching habit. The list goes on and on.
Let me be clear here: I LOVED these books when I was a kid. I must have read every single one of them hundreds of times over. I don’t remember precisely what quality about them I was so enamored of -- the brightly colored illustrations? The big words that I was able to read and comprehend all by myself? The talking animal characters? The idyllic natural settings? Probably all of it.
My name in my books
And now my eldest has started taking an interest in these books, so it’s not uncommon for one or more to be included in his selections for bedtime reading. And I just can’t help it because as much as Young Me loved these books, every time my kid places one of them in my lap and takes a seat next to me, my eyes take a nice wide roll in their sockets. 
I don’t complain though, I read it. I read the hell out of that book. The only hint I give that this isn’t my absolute favorite piece of writing in the whole entire world is the continued eye-rolling that occurs throughout the duration of the story, from the opening paragraph In The Meadow Of The Gleaming Dawn or On The Other Side Of Sunrise or wherever the hell all the way to the rhyming bit of wisdom on the last page. You see, I call them the Hippie Books because every time I’m reading one of them, I feel like there should be a pack of stoned hairy people sitting in a semi-circle around me grooving to what I’m laying down. Yeah man. And there ought to be gentle folk-music playing somewhere in the background. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against gentle folk-music other than the fact that I can’t stand the sound of it. And it’s kind of the same thing with the books. The language is so overly-flowery, the dialogue so sappy, and every story is so over the top with its need to drive home its all-important moral theme, it all kind of makes the Adult Me a bit batty. 
I don’t know how many roads a man has to walk down, okay? Quit bothering me.
But Adult Me just rolls his eyes and reads. Because I can’t get past, and don’t really want to get past the fact that, as much as these books might irritate me now, I loved them back in the day. They were a step along the path on my way to a love of reading. They may not be my number one choice on the list of Things I Loved As A Youth That I Want To Share With My Kids, but if they’re digging it, I’m less than inclined to steer them away. If my kid wants to hear a story about a unicorn, more power to him.
So in defense of The Hippie Books...I guess I'm just defending them against my own biases. Anybody else read these when they were a kid?
