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Wednesday, 11 September 2013

#ReadItMD13 Theme Week - "All the Awesome Animals - Which do we like best? Cat books or dog books?"

Posted by ReadItDaddy at September 11, 2013 Labels: , ,

#ReadItMD13 Theme Week

All the Awesome Animals

Which books do we like best?

Cat books or Dog Books?

We've often been lucky enough to interview authors and artists and sometimes we sneak in a very unfair question. "Which do you prefer? Cats or Dogs?" As part of our #ReadItMD13 theme week all about awesome animals we thought we'd take a look back through the ReadItDaddy archives and turn the question on ourselves. Are we predominantly cat-obsessed or are we canny about canines instead?

It was a tough challenge. When you're faced with some of the greatest characters in children's picture books, how can you possibly choose favourites?

On the cat side, our favourite characters (amongst others) include:


  • Mog (the forgetful cat from Judith Kerr's peerless books)
  • Mog (the witch's cat in Meg and Mog)
  • Chester (From Chester's Back)
  • Splat the Cat
  • Moonpie, Andre and Tiny (from "There are / aren't cats in this book by Viv Schwarz)
  • The Tobermory Cat
  • Ginger (from Charlotte Voake's excellent books)
  • The Lighthouse Keeper's Cat
  • Wilbur (from the Winnie the Witch books)
  • Red Cat and Blue Cat (and Yellow cat too) from Jenni Desmond's book of the same name
  • Six Dinner Sid
  • Amazing Mr Zooty
  • The Cat in the Hat
  • Backstage Cat (again from Jenni Desmond with Harriet Ziefert)
  • Keith (the cat with the magic hat)
  • Tootsie (from "Please don't torment Tootsie" by Margaret Chamberlain)
  • Holly (from Ruth Brown's book of the same name)
Quite a strong showing - but then on the dog side of things, another cracking list including: 
  • Dog (from Louise Yates' fabulous "Dog Loves" series)
  • Dr Dog (From Babette Cole's delicious duo of Doc Dog books)
  • Dog (from Eddie and Dog by Alison Brown)
  • Black Dog (from Levi Pinfold's dark and lovely book)
  • Harry (from Margaret Bloy-Graham and Gene Zion's fantastic book series)
  • NO! (from Maria Altes brilliant book of the same name)
  • Clifford (the big red dog)
  • Old Dog (from Tony Ross's brilliant book of the same name)
  • Dog (from Dogs don't do Ballet)
  • Nina and George (from "Stop that Barking Nina" by Anita Pouroulis and Becky Jeffries)
  • Claude (From Alex T. Smith's utterly brilliant series of books)
  • Hairy Maclairy (from Lynley Dodd's brilliant series)
  • Laika (from Laika the Astronaut by Owen Davey)
  • Bored Bill (by Liz Pichon)
  • Mr Renny (by Leo Timmers)
  • Dixie O'Day and Percy (from Shirley Hughes and Clara Vulliamy's fabulous new book)
We couldn't decide - so we painstakingly went through the blog counting up each and every review to see how many dog or cat books (books where each were either the main characters or quite a strong part of the story) and the numbers are now in...

CATS - 42 books! 
DOGS - 31 books!

So there you have it. Cats scrape it by a whisker but something tells me it won't take long till the dogs catch up!