When I was 4 years old, my mother bought some of these books to try to teach me how to read. By the second book, I was so annoyed by the simplistic and unrealistic repetition and content-empty "stories" (in the verbal sense) that I insisted my mother show me how to sound out words in other books that had actual story content. I was reading quite well before I went to kindergarten, but NO thanks to "Dick and Jane".