Phoebe and Her Unicorn by Dana Simpson for July 20, 2015

My school never had a summer reading list

I never minded the reading assignments that were half an hour or an hour a day, or even a certain number of pages, but when they tell me what I have to read then I resent it. I hated it when they did that to the kids, too.

Learning how to do research.Learning without realizing that you are learning.

By the time I graduated high school I was convinced I hated reading; the assigned books were soooo bad. When friends in collage started recommending books I initially shrugged them off. But once I started reading good books I learned that I loved to read.

I have always enjoyed reading, but I detested being made to read from a list of books. One year, after doing the three books I made a book report combining all three books. Afterweards, I realized it sounded better than some of the summer movies I’ve seen that year.

Reading isn’t fun. If it was, encyclopedias and technical manuals would be bestsellers. Reading something interesting makes up for it though.

I love reading technical manuals! Good thing I suppose. I dropped out of high school, and had to do something for a living, all that technical reading meant I could get a good job.

I see now.

Going back to comment yesterday…I never meant to say this strip is unoriginal in any way. It is quite different from many other strips, including Calvin & Hobbes. Sure, there are some similarities, but I think there are more differences, and that degree of originality is why this is my favorite strip.

Anybody here remember the “Summer Weekly Reader?”

Reading Madeline l’Engle’s “A Wrinke In Time” for an assignment in 5th grade got me super hooked. I started reading to the exclusion of most of my schoolwork, and that marked my first D. This trend continued through all of middle school. Books are dangerous.

Why did Marigold use a contraction? I taught for 33 years, Reading, English, and Science, and I never agreed with forced summer reading.

“When you make something mandatory for someone, they resent it, and when they resent it, they **** with it.” —John Oliver

The problem is that you never know what you’re missing. For years I avoided “Pride and Prejudice” in the expectation—based on the title alone—of “awful sublimity and unmitigated grimth”, but, one day, fearing that I hadn’t had as much Horrid Medicine lately as was good for me, I picked it up, and roared my ribs out at the first sentence. My wife and I spent a good deal of our honeymoon in England visiting sites connected with l’aimable Jane.

I liked reading when I was a kid.

uses a contraction