Frazz by Jef Mallett for August 29, 2016

I will never read Catcher in the Rye again.

Never had that one assigned. Did have to struggle through Hardy’s “Return of the Native” and Malamud’s “The Assistant” however.

The only required reading that I ever actually read was ‘The Outsiders’. I liked it a lot more than I thought I would.

Loved literature as a kid, especially the older stuff. As a result I had already read most of the books on my reading list before they were on it.

In Junior High, in 1967, we had to read Ivanhoe, which I enjoyed very much……A little earlier we had to read Ethan Fromm….Could have skipped that one…The way it turned out, It made me mad, because it made me sad……..

In my Junior school we started with “THE HOBBIT”

The only junior high reading I remember is “Phoebe B. Beebee And Her New Canoe Canal.”

“Lord of the Flies” awful. I’m more the “Pride and Prejudice” type.

I read Playboy for the articles.

Never had a summer reading list.

I don’t recall ever having a summer reading list. Then again, if I had, my attitude would have looked a lot like Caulfield’s. I do recall finishing the library’s Summer Reading Club in the first week of summer, but that was just a number of books, not specific books. We had required reading during the school year, some of it was terrible, some of it was boring, some of it was darn amazing. Fortunately, the schools I went to avoided the infatuation with bad ‘60s literature (and also avoided Catcher in the Rye, which wasn’t 60’s at all), I had to learn to loathe that garbage on my own.

Never had a summer reading list. But one that I read myself that I liked was “The Masters” by C.S. Lewis. Didn’t read “The Hobbit” and the LOTR series until much later.

The problem wasn’t the reading – it was reading them to discover whatever the teacher was trying to point out. I read ‘Catcher in the Rye’ on my own – my older brother was reading it for his English class. I must have had a different teacher when I got there [English major].

We read ‘The Return of the Native’ and ‘Red Badge of Courage’, probably would have better if not read for class but just for the joy of reading.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was the writer I could never get interested in; him and Hemingway. Different tastes.

As the author Richard Amour once wrote “…the required reading list. Better even then artificial respiration for keeping dead authors alive.”

Caulfield got a one-bun salute!

Funny that Caulfield doesn’t have resentment but wants to play along for the fun of it. He studies human behavior and gets a laugh out of it.-I do recall getting such things which I ignored since I was always reading, my own interests.

NabuquduriuzhurI avoided the “bad authors of the 1960s” by getting out of high school in 1950 and university in 1955. Whatever works, I suppose, but it does make one rather old by now,

For all of you who missed the gag when I dissed Catcher in the Rye, the protagonist of the book is Holden Caulfield.

We didn’t have a summer reading list when I went to school. However, I remember in school having to read “Of Mice and Men”. I hated that book. Later I read on my own “The Red Pony”, I will never read anything else John Steinbeck wrote.

Rudyard Kipling, the collected poetry; Edgar Rice Burroughs, the John Carter series; H.G. Wells,The Time Machine, and William Schrier’s RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH. Summer between my freshman and sophomore year of high school was epic.

Night-Gaunt49The last Playboy article I read (at a branch public library in Vancouver) was the Carter interview. The lust comment was taken out of context by those claiming to be Christian, but had no idea of its background meaning.

One of my favorite quotes read as a kid is from a playmate of the month under PET PEEVES. Hers was “the proliferation of plastic. A future civilization is going to dug ours up and think Ronald McDonald was a god.”

Tangential but related: I’m sure I’m not the only one who was put off Shakespeare because of how it was presented to us.: Middle-aged juvenile delinquents, uttering speech that no one seemed to be able to just speak but must be declaimed; as demonstraions of the great ‘humor’ in his work, we were given examples like the goddawful punnery in the opening scenes of ‘Julius Caesar’. If you ever have the opportunity to see the David Tennant/Catherine Tate (yes, Doctor Who and companion Donna Noble) you will see what we were missing all that time. Be careful: you might hurt yourself laughing.