Today is Read Across America Day, which is celebrated every year on Dr. Seuss' birthday. According to Seussville.com, "Across the country, thousands of schools, libraries, and community centers participate by bringing together kids, teens, and books ..."

So in honor of reading and in celebration of the genius Dr. Seuss, here is an infographic from mamiverse.com with 30 Dr. Seuss quotes to live by:


[Via: 30 Dr. Seuss Quotes to Live By]

-- Cheryl Sadler | CSadler@News-Herald.com | @nhcheryl

It's a tough question.
What's your favorite Dr. Seuss book?
There are so many wonderful works - how can you pick just one?!

I love the lessons of "The Sneetches"  (how cute are they?) and "The Lorax." I love "If I Ran the Zoo" and "If I Ran the Circus" for their clever characters. And I love "Green Eggs and Ham" for the sheer joy of reading it aloud.
But if I had to pick one, it'd likely be "The Cat in the Hat," which combines all three.
How about you?

Share your favorite here.
Maybe your comment will be used in Sunday's News-Herald.
And in honor of his birthday today, I leave you with this ... "The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go."

-Tricia Ambrose

1. If you watched Mad Men this season, then you know Roger Sterling wrote his memoirs.

It turns out these memoirs are real (even if the person who wrote them isn’t) and will be published by Grove/Atlantic.

How does one qualify this? Memoir? Novel? Cash in?

Regardless, Sterling’s Gold does not top the meta-memoir trilogy penned by Barney Stinson: The Playbook; Bro on the Go; and The Bro Code.

Those were legend — wait for it —

2. Professor Kathryn Sutherland of Oxford University said that some of Jane Austen’s trademark pristine prose may be from the hand of her editor. Sutherland studied more than 1,100 handwritten documents from Austen and concluded that she had “a powerful counter-grammatical way of writing” and “the polished punctuation and epigrammatic style we see in Emma and Persuasion is simply not there.”

Sutherland attributes the style difference to editor William Gifford, who worked with Austen’s publisher.

Then again, sometimes, things look different on the second or third draft. And I’m not sure it’s that big of a deal that Austen had an editor. Who doesn’t?

3. Speaking of Austen, Salon speculated on how classic literary characters would react to current technology. They concluded that Emma would love her some Facebook.

Can anyone doubt that if Holden Caulfield were around today he’d have a blog? He practically invented the blog, five decades before the things existed! As for James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus: He’d have a Tumblr.

4. Danny Devito will voice the Lorax in a movie based on Dr. Seuss’s book.

It will also star Zac Efron, Betty White and Ed Helms as the Once-Ler. No word on who will play the Swany Swans.

5. dary.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

1. An incomplete and previously unknown Dr. Seuss manuscript is up for auction.

All Sorts of Sports would have followed the exploits of fickle athlete, Pete, had it not lost Seuss’s interest.

“What, in my opinion, is wrong with this story is that ... despite the greatness of Pete as a stellar athlete hero ... the negative image of him flubbing and unable to catch any ball at all will make him a schnook,” Geisel wrote in a note to his former employee who has put the unfinished manuscript up for bid. “This is not entirely apparent in the text, but when you picture these negative scenes in illustrations, you will find that negatives are always more memorable than positives. And I think the reader’s reaction will be, ‘What’s the matter with this dope?’”

The pages also include rudimentary Seussian scribbles, which are valuable in themselves.

What I find interesting about All Sorts of Sports is what it reveals about Seuss’s creative process. He seems to establish meter before writing his poetry, forcing his words to fit the rhythm. In Sports, he uses “blumf” as a placeholder for as-yet unwritten words.

2. The New Yorker had some Twitter fun with #literarysandwiches.

Some suggestions — The Dave Eggers: a broken, runny egg on staggeringly thick bread; served with a guide to its enjoyment.

The Animal Farm: supposed to include a variety of meats in equal parts; in practice, though, mostly ham.

The Nora Roberts: all cheese.

The Beckett: The sandwich you order and then wait for. And wait for. And wait for.
The Leopold Bloom: the inner organs of beasts and fowls, with relish.

The Catcher in the Rye: meatloaf and ketchup on rye bread.

The Mary Shelley: leftover bits from other sandwiches stitched together.

3. Finally, a judge has refused to dismiss a plagiarism suit against J.K. Rowling. (You remember this chestnut, right? The suit accuses Rowling of stealing from Willy the Wizard.)

However, this doesn’t mean the plaintiffs have a strong case. The judge said their chances of success were “improbable.” But it does mean there will be a proper hearing.

1. Joey Comeau analyzes five books you never want to see listed as a favorite on someone’s dating site.

His choices imply a libertine balance. He thinks anything by Ayn Rand and the Bible are red flags. (I couldn’t get through Atlas Shrugged with a thirty-aught-six, but the Bible has some lovely literature in it. Regardless of religion, I think everyone should read Ecclesiastes.)

He rightfully warns people of The Notebook. Comeau’s take: This is either the kind of (expletive deleted) guy who puts Nicholas Sparks on his profile to seem sensitive, or the kind of (expletive deleted) girl who falls for it.

I’d be nervous about anyone who likes Sweet Valley High or Kerouac. Also, it’s cool like to comics. (No, it is. Samuel L. Jackson said so at Comicon.) But I wouldn’t categorize “anything Batman” as one of my favorites.

2. Mental_floss lists seven things you might not know about Dr. Seuss.

Favorite fact: Seuss worked the word “contraceptive” into the original text of Hop on Pop to make sure his editor read it.

3. Apparently, people hate The Giving Tree.

What a shock. People don’t understand the concept of altruism.

4. Apparently, it’s Roald Dahl day or month or something. In honor of that, Philip Ardagh lists his ten favorite Dahl books. (My favorite, BFG, barely made the list.)

5. Speaking of Jane Austen (we’re always speaking of Jane Austen,) the Austen Fiction Manuscripts Project allows us to read Austen’s handwritten manuscripts. The site doesn't have her best known stuff (Emma, Pride and Prejudice) uploaded but it does have Persuasion.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

Textual scholars have compiled an amended version of Finnegans Wake.

Good, this will give Joycean scholars something to discuss and the rest of us something to ignore.

It’s Friday. Behold the melange.

Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon spent 30 years pouring over drafts of James Joyce’s least comprehensible work. Their research lead to 9,000 alterations in the amended Finnegans Wake.

In an interview, Rose said, “Thus the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude.”

No, he didn’t. But that would be awesome. What Rose actually said:

Because of the difficulty of the language of Finnegans Wake, the syntax is not immediately apparent and the syntaxical coherence of the book was effectively lost when it was brought into print. This coherence has been fully restored in the new edition and results in what can be called the first definitive edition of Joyce’s final masterpiece.

Actually, the syntaxical coherence was lost when Joyce wrote the book; and you couldn’t restore its coherence with a decoder ring and a babelfish.

Moving right along: We didn’t write anything about Dr. Seuss’s birthday this year. (It was Tuesday.) As consolation, I offer Shirley Hughes’s top 10 picture book characters. (No Dr. Seuss characters make the cut, but Babar does.)

I have nothing to say about Charles Pellegrino that hasn’t already been said. I will grit my teeth when he receives a six-figure advance for his next book.

Finally, The New York Times explains e-book pricing.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald

P.S. For the record, Tricia’s absolutely right. It was jarring to have to stop every few pages of Moby Dick and write my thoughts. By the second day, I decided to only blog between chapters. It felt like less of an interruption, then.

If anything, I underestimated the physical challenge of trying to read for 13 consecutive hours.

It’s Dr. Seuss’s birthday!
The day to pronounce his worthday!
A day of joy and mirthday!

Dr. Seuss — or Theodore Geisel, if you insist — taught me more than Shakespeare or Rousseau or Kant. Dr. Seuss taught me that if I stand on enough of my coworkers, I can be the king of Willoughby; and just because I hear a Who, doesn’t mean I’m crazy; or that I didn’t need that thneed.

Seuss taught young girls that they only needed one tail feather. That tart Lolla-Lee-Lou may have two, but one can be enough for you.

Seuss taught me the value of nurture over nature. Mayzie may have laid that egg, but Horton raised it into the elephant-bird thing it is today.

A lot of people want to intellectualize Dr. Seuss. It’s easy to do, if only because the guy was smart. But sometimes a wocket is just a wocket. Sure, a megalomaniacal turtle may end up king of the mud, but that doesn’t make Yertle an allegory for Hitler. Isn’t it enough that he be Yertle?

Just because everyone’s telling Marvin K. Mooney — the single most reviled figure in the history of the written word — to leave, doesn’t make him Richard Nixon.

I’m not saying he never used subtext — for example, it took a butter battle to make some people realize the silliness of Cold War posturing — but it never mattered more than the story.

Simple morals, that’s why Seuss matters. If an eastgoing thing meets a westgoing thing, some thing has got to give.

Nobody knows the places you’ll go.

Don’t be afraid to indulge your imagination. Just have it cleaned up before your mother gets home.

Most importantly, words don’t need to exist for them to rhyme.

So tomorrow I can return to pontificating about the importance of translators or the supremacy of Thomas Hardy, but today’s a day to appreciate the Seuss.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m out like Marvin K. Mooney.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com