Public Domain Pooh!

I'm not a fan of books that are mostly quotes, but I had to give this one a go because of Pooh. But, boy, was it bad.

The author, Matt Hobbs, tries to make the quotes more meaningful by grouping the quotes by topic -- friendship, perseverance, mindfulness, kindness, imagination -- and putting little self-help introductions before each of the sections, but his writing is dreadfully dull, simplistic, and repetitive, what with the little conclusions he puts at the end of each section to remind us of what we were supposed to be thinking about.

Then we come to the quotes, and this is where my blood starts to boil. Hobbs puts A. A. Milne's name on the cover and says the quotes are from Pooh, but the vast majority of these quotes do not appear in any book written by A. A. Milne. Many of them are from the Disney films with no attribution to the screenwriters who actually wrote them. Many of them seem to be from internet memes by the sort of people who just put a picture of Pooh next to something that they hope sounds cute and wise and that will garner some likes. It's very obvious the author just scraped dreck from the web with no interest in accuracy or proper attribution.

The most egregious sins here are misattributing to Pooh Yogi Bear's "I'm smarter than the average bear," and Chandler Bing's "I'm not good [sic] at the advice. Can I interest you in a sarcastic comment?" WTF?!?!

This is a garbage cash grab done poorly and cynically.

(Pooh Project: Phase 2! I've managed to catalog all the shorter Pooh projects my family owns (see the list here). While I work through few remaining longer Pooh books we own, I'm missing my daily dose of Pooh, so I'm going to start seeking out some of the Pooh books I don't own – yet – from libraries IRL and online. See the reviews here.) ( )