Enjoyable little book of poems. ( )

20.00

I picked this up from my mum's bookshelf when I was back home. I must have read it a few times in my youth - there's one in particular that affected me a lot, which is the one about not stepping on the cracks, for fear of being eaten by the bears. Having read that, I immediately stopped stepping on the cracks on my way to school, and while I don't mind stepping on cracks now, I still have a couple of residual compulsions that stem from that time...

The rest I don't remember in particular, but there's one poem that's supposed to be the introduction of Winnie the Pooh before he took on that name, and there's a bunch that are just... magical.

I'm not a big poetry reader, anyway. I think this is the first poetry book in, like, ever, that I've read. How funny~ ( )

Over three hundred books into my Pooh Project, and I have yet to read any of the original Milne books? Oops. Well, here we go!

Unfortunately, this one is all poetry, and I'm not a fan of poetry. At least it's short.

For me, Milne's poems work best when their from the perspective of a child exerting their will or independence, rebelling against the dominance and stupidity of adults: "Politeness," "Rice Pudding," "Independence," "Market Square." The best of these and the jauntiest to read out loud is "Disobedience" with James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree and his straying mother.

Winnie the Pooh makes an appearance under the alias of Edward Bear with a reflection on body image that barely prepares one for the greatness to come.

(My Pooh Project: I love Winnie the Pooh, and so does my wife. Having a daughter gave us a chance to indoctrinate her into the cult by buying and reading her every Pooh book we came across. How many is that? I’m going to count them this year by reading and reviewing one every day and seeing which month I finally run out. Track my progress here:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/23954351-rod-brown?ref=nav_mybooks&she... ) ( )

I know and like these poems. Unfortunately the Open Media ebook I got has _horrible_ formatting - they maintained all the pictures (yay!) but the text is often split by the pictures, in ways that lose a line or two. In order to read several of the poems I had to scroll back and forth and back and... At best, this is a distraction; at worst - I only knew some of them were missing lines because I know the poems. A pity - a poor edition of a usually (mildly) enjoyable book. ( )