I can’t read The Cat In The Hat every day. Not even every week. When Logan is older and reading time is a little more interactive I’ll spend more time with kids books, but for now, I just read to him whatever book I happen to be reading. A few nights back when it was time to read, I sat on the floor while Katie rocked him in the chair. I opened my Kindle app on my phone and picked up where I had left off in my most recent read, The Ghost Brigades, by John Scalzi.

I am somewhat new to Scalzi’s work. I loved Redshirts. I’ve read some of his short fiction and really dug it. I read Old Man’s War (OMW) last year and it was easily my favorite book of 2016. The Ghost Brigades is the sequel to OMW and is also turning out to be an incredible read. (UPDATE: I finished it, it was amazing.)

This book is military sci-fi and the scene was a battleship Skip Driving into space besides an alien ship and shooting it to hell. That was a bit odd for bedtime reading, but I kept going. The main character made it to the surface of the planet below and got into a life or death confrontation with an alien race. It was intense, but I plowed through. After all, Logan is just shy of 3 months, right? He won’t remember this.

So the story goes on and the colonists the team were there to try and protect were found dead in a building. It’s important to note that I forgot that this alien race found humans to be quite tasty. The characters go into this building and the humans are up on hooks, some gutted, some missing limbs, barrels below full of offal. There is a tarp over a pile. Our main character pulls up the tarp and it is all the colonist’s children.

I want to be clear that the book is not overly explicit in its description, it gives some details and lets your brain do the rest of the work. But my brain being my brain, it went into overdrive and I realized I am reading about death, dismemberment, and the eating of human flesh to my three month old son.

I stopped.

I made a comment to Katie that I should find something else to read. She mentioned this is why she sticks to The Cat In The Hat. I scrolled through my Kindle library and decided on Chivalry, a short story by Neil Gaiman about an old British lady who finds the Holy Grail at in a knick-knack shop. After she buys it a Knight of the Round Table who comes looking for it so he can end his quest for King Arthur. It’s a funny story, in a crusty British way and it follows the first 3 rules of my new list:

Tech’s List of Things To Never Read To My Child:

1) No dismemberment
2) No beheadings
3) No cannibalism

That’s a good start.