Frazz by Jef Mallett for June 20, 2024

I do re-read. Actually quite a bit. It’s part of my “keep having a bank account until I don’t want or need one” policy to only buy SOME new books from time to time. I actually sorta do that pretty well. Some.

A book like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s «Little Prince» might bring new thoughts if you read it again after one year. Not because the book changes, but hopefully because you did – especially as an 8 year old.

How about reading pulp fiction? She could have them read the transcripts of the upcoming presidential debates.

Just tell them to read anything by Terry Pratchett. They could start with “The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents” or “The Carpet People” or “The Wee Free Men”.

“A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.” ― Robertson Davies

This is the trouble with having the same pupils at the same age year after year after year. In real life, teachers can recycle last year’s list, no problem. Though they probably shouldn’t!

She should assign Atlas Shrugged. And then the Gulag Archipelago followed by Ulyssesm and then Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Go full Ivan Drago on them, “I must BREAK you!”

My definition of good literature is that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure.

—Gene Wolfe

Reading – always a favorite pastime but losing some of its interest. Favorite fiction authors from the 30’s to the 80’s have retired or passed, much to my regret. Many newer authors are light on the essential elements, i.e., characters, language, plot, and setting. It’s as if they are writing for that well-known source of mediocrity – TV.

My reading list is like a river, very fluid and always changing.

We never had such a thing as a summer reading list. For all we cared, the school could have gone to the Moon and back during that time.

She should collaborate with the little girl who last appeared on 6/17 (I can’t remember her name). I bet she has some good ideas.

It’s only because it’s a comic strip that the kids have the same teacher each year.

I don’t remember ever being assigned summer reading. How could that even work if you didn’t have the same teacher from year to year? Was it common in the days of one-room country schoolhouses? (The one-room school I would have gone to closed the year before I started kindergarten.)

The only novel I’ve ever read more than once was “Catcher in the Rye”

Post a list from ten years ago, they will never know the difference.

Unless she flunked everyone last year, wouldn’t the books be “new” for this year’s students?

It’s like they’re aware they’re stuck in an infinite time loop.