Most books that are meant to send children to sleep are less than amusing, but Dr. Seuss' treads a fine line between calming rhythmical language to lull the listener and highly amusing scenarios that make you want to keep reading right 'til the end.

If I have to read this book one more time, my head is going to explode. I give it five stars because my daughter dearly, dearly loves it.

You know what I like about Dr. Seuss? Sometimes it's not about "teaching" anything—it's just about enjoying a good, toe-tapping rhyme, and my child can't get enough of him. I don't mind when stories have a message, but sometimes the joy of the story is sacrificed for the sake of the message, and that's no way to learn love of reading. This is a largely meaningless story, but boy does she love it.

Perhaps, since I grew up with Dr. Seuss's books, over the decades they've started to lose their charm for me? I found Dr. Seuss's Sleep Book too repetitive, and a bit lengthy.

Maybe the tedium is the point, if you're trying to coax a stubborn little one into sleep?

One page did have an unusual charm, and felt totally relatable:

A Jedd is in bed,
And the bed of a Jedd
Is the softest
Of beds in the world.
It is said.
He makes it from pom poms
He grows on his head,
And he's sleeping right now
On the softest of fluff,
Completely exhausted
From growing the stuff.

Completely exhausted after doing it all myself. Yep, I feel that.

Now that my internet is back on and had a day to ponder about this book I am actually glad that I sticked to my guns and didn't change the rating for this book. I was conflicted whether to give it 4 or 5 but this is definitely 4 star material. For me when it comes to this book I didn't get that enthusiastic feeling when reading Dr. Seuss books and I believe its because I didn't actually care about the characters or the dialogue.

This bug called the Van Vleck starts to yawn and then it becomes contagious for the people around the bug. When they start yawning, it starts to spread and the creatures who normally follow routine are now quickly heading off to bed and falling asleep. As more creatures and people start to fall asleep, the sleepers of the world are now being recorded by the Audio Telly O-Tally O-Count. This book is meant for being read at night when your child is heading to sleep and probably I would have cherished it more if I had this at night.

I didn't feel any sentimentality when reading this book and I believe many would love and cherish this book if their parents or loved ones read them bed night stories. I do not remember my parents reading any bed time stories when I was child and I feel like I missed a part of a typical childhood. As a child I would either fall asleep rather quickly without any assistance or my parents would put on a movie for me and I would knock out within 15-30 minutes. I would still recommend this book for children and I believe they would love it if you read it to them as they headed off to bed.

This children's novel is written by the renowned author Dr. Seuss, who wrote several very famous children's books like Green Eggs and Ham . This children's novel was very similar to those others in style and context. When I read it, I knew it was Dr. Seuss's flavor and style. Obviously, since this is a children's book, there were not too many things that stood out to me. I knew most, if not all, of Dr. Seuss's little novels for children and this was one I came across on when digging for children's books. Dr. Seuss was a great novel writer and was a genius. I think that he really knew how to get the audience's attention and showed his skill in his novels. I love the pictures that go with the words. s they always say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Overall, I think that this children's story should deserve a 4.5 out of 5 stars.

Look I didn't like Dr. Seuss that much when I was a kid, and I don't like him that much as an adult, and I don't like reading this aloud to my 4-year old cos, like every Dr. Seuss book, it goes ON AND ON AND ON. I like the sound of Seuss's rhymes, he has a great sense of rhythm and cadence and all that, but jeez why do all his stories have to go on for so long? I don't think I've ever read a Dr. Seuss book that I didn't want to end 20 pages before it actually ended.

Maybe there will be some intermediate age where I get into this or Izzy does, or Asha does, I dunno. I feel kinda bad giving this 2 stars cos it's clearly quality, I mean it's better than 90% of the dreck that constitutes "children's books." But in my heart I don't like it and what are Goodreads stars if not a window into the HEART AND SOUL OF A MAN

I loved this one! Made me want to go to bed in the middle of the day. Goodnight, guys!

Really one big nonsense about nothing whatsoever but another yet genius though unsatisfying attempt of our master author for the kiddies to come up with words which do not exist; though of course none could be better in this than James Joyce, we do not expect our children to read heavy literature when they are babies, and it's there wherein the book succeeds: to delight little children everywhere. Me as an adult, however, found this one of the lesser perfect writings of Dr. Seuss.

I found this one to be a very dull read. Then again, maybe that was the idea all along. This is definitely not one of the man's best books.

I'm reading through all of Dr. Seuss's books chronologically, and this is his twenty-fourth one. It's also his first bedtime book, his first book with his name in the title, and his eighth list book. It was published on August 1, 1962, nearly a year since his previous book The Sneetches and Other Stories, and nearly a year and a half since his last book of original material Ten Apples Up on Top, since The Sneetches contained stories he had written in the 1950s.

I think it's quite interesting that his name—his pseudonym, I mean—was popular enough at this point that either he or Random House decided to put it right there in the title, and they're about to do it again the next year with Dr. Seuss's ABC. To me this shows how remarkably successful his brand had become in the twenty-five years since his first picture book. They could have called this lots of things, but Dr. Seuss's Sleep Book is clear and precise; parents knew exactly what they were getting.

I also think it's interesting he's gone back to his original structure from And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street from 1937: the list. This is another one of what scholars call Seuss's bestiary books, because it's a series of comical fantasy creatures, but if we expand our view beyond simply made-up beasts to look at the structure of the list, then we can include some other books where he goes through a list of amazing circus acts or people walking down the street. So like I said that makes this his eighth list book, the previous one coming in 1960 with One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. And this is just a classic example. It's teaching phonics to kids who may be reading on their own, and providing wonderful rhymes for any reader, along with the pleasure of encountering increasingly preposterous creatures as we journey into nighttime: the Collapseable Frink, the floating Offts who weight minus one pound, the Foona-Lagoona Baboona, and all kinds of clubs and groups of "people" who do remarkable "sports" in their sleep—I love that he keeps using that word—like snoring, talking, walking, and eventually floating down rivers in tubs and things.

As I've been reading Seuss's list books in order, though, I've noticed a bit more to their structure, namely that he starts with fairly believable and ordinary things then builds his way up to more and more outlandish creatures. The illustrations get more complex, the energy builds, until there's usually a climax where everything explodes on the page in complete chaos, like the train crash in Green Eggs and Ham. Then there's a spread or two in which everything calms down and resolves. So as I was reading through the delightful sequence of sleepers I was wondering how Seuss would handle that this time, given that the book is designed for bedtime with a calming, soporific (as Beatrix Potter would say) effect.

The answer is in the illustrations. Drawn in his traditional ink and acrylic medium, he uses three colors—red, yellow, and especially a greenish blue—done in various tints and shades. As the book progresses, the drawings get increasingly zany—I remember spending lots of time with my young kids exploring the castles and the crowd scenes—but the colors move more and more into that blue, getting darker and darker with each new spread. The list culminates in two spreads of group scenes including as many people and creatures as he could fit in; they're both marvelous examples of how he can lay out a busy scene, accounting for both the gutter and the text. In the final illustration the background is dark blue, the creatures are all a monochrome light blue, as if they're in the dark, and there's a red tree-like support weaving its way around that many creatures are sleeping in. It's chaotic in that is has so many animals in so many places and positions, but the colors mute it and make it a calming, rather than an exciting, picture. This is the page on which Seuss turns the narrative back around to the child, saying all of these zillions of things are sleeping, so "how about you?" It's the same structure as always, but transformed to induce sleep rather than excitement.

And then there are two spreads after this that really project tranquility, with little or nothing to look at. The first is a dark blue spread with black ink giving an impression of stars, clouds, and the child's bedroom window (in yellow). There are no hard lines here, such as the roof or side of the house, but more of a haze, where he lets the blue imply the hard lines. The text refers to the yellow window by saying "when you put out your light...". And then the final page has something Dr. Seuss had never done before, or, I think, since: an entire spread with no pictures at all, just the solid blue color with the words "Good night" written in white. With nothing to look at, and exhausted from all of the creatures that have come before, children by this point should fall right to sleep. It's an excellent execution of a calming, sleepy ending, and it shows how well Seuss had learned to structure a narrative for children over his career.

I should also mention the rhymes are great, including quite a few mild tongue-twisters, so it's fun to read as well. And his sentence breaks increasingly don't come at the end of a line; he's now able to frequently run a sentence past the end of the line, sticking the rhyming word but flowing on with the thought. This reminded me, actually, of Shakespeare. In early plays the line break was always the sentence break. But by the late 1590s and things like Hamlet he would run the sentences right past the line, putting his periods/full stops wherever he wanted, adding iambs, etc.—you get even more of this in the late plays like The Tempest and The Winter's Tale. Here we've got the same thing for Dr. Seuss. His text is no longer at the mercy of his rhymes; there's a real sophistication to it that surpasses the sing-songy lilt that you see when people try to imitate his style, with their momentum always stopping at the end of the line. Here, his eliminating that end-of-line pause not only gives energy to the text, but it makes for much more enjoyable reading. And it shows a real mastery of his craft as a writer, just as the illustrations do of his skill as an artist.

I believe I read this as a child, and I know I read it to my own kids when they were small. But for this project of reading through Seuss's books I just read it on a Sunday morning, and I believe I yawned four or five times before I got through it, including right on the first page when I looked at the drawing of the tiny yawning bug. It may not have helped that my dog was falling asleep next to me and my teenage kids were still asleep in bed, but Seuss's thesis, that yawns are catching, proved quite true. Perhaps I'll take a nap now.

My complete series of reviews of all sixty-three Dr. Seuss books in order—a list I believe only exists here—plus three of his many books published posthumously, is here. And here specifically are my reviews of his previous book, n  The Sneetches and Other Storiesn, and his next one, n  Hop on Popn.

''Way out in the west, in the town of Mercedd,
The Hinkle-Horn Honking Club just went to bed.
Every horn has been quietly hung on a hook,
For the night, in its own private Hunkle Horn Nook.

All this long, happy day, they've been honking about
And the Hinkle-Horn Honkers have honked themselves out.
But they'll wake up quite fresh in the morning. And then...
They'll start right in Hinkle-Horn honking again.'' <3

The Sleep Book is nothing more or less than sixty pages of characters falling asleep. There is no plot, no main character or setting that appears on more than a single two-page-spread, and absolutely no theme or purpose beyond sleep. Who other than the great Dr. Seuss could possibly have pulled this off?

What makes the book great is the variety of it. There are pages of people, animals, and fictitious Seussian creatures galore, plus plenty of classic Seuss-style landscapes, buildings, and vehicles. All are hilarious as readers expect from Seuss, and none are repetitious or lame. But while Seuss never deviates from his primary drive to be funny, he also fills the book with thought-provoking hooks. To take just one example:

The news has come in from the District of Dofft
That two Offt are asleep and they're sleeping aloft.
And how are they able to sleep off the ground?
I'll tell you. I weighed one last week and I found
That an Offt is SO light he weighs minus one pound.

While some may view this as merely an attempt to be amusing, smarter children may also be lead to think seriously about whether it is possible for something to weigh minus one pound. It's like that on many of the pages of this book and many parts of other Seuss masterpieces: behind the silliness lies pathways to intriguing and mind-expanding thoughts, for kids of all ages and adults too. So get a copy of The Sleep Book and open some new horizons for the smartest kid you know.