Tom the Dancing Bug by Ruben Bolling for July 11, 2019

I can’t see any reason you’d have to claim you loved the book you’re reporting on. Would a teacher really count it against you if you took the tone that the book was a boring load of crap and you felt the time you spent reading it was wasted?

Kid, you’ve got a future as a scriptwriter.

I read that when I was a kid! I loved Sulu’s Ghost.

I read a lot as a kid, but went to Catholic School. None of the books I read were approved so I read Classics Illustrated and did reports on them.

Future ghost writer?

Been there…

When I was in High School, I wrote a book report on “Dracula” by Bram Stoker. My teacher gave me a “B” and wrote on the report “isn’t this book a bit childish?” Obviously, she’d never read the book! I brought the book to class the next day, gave it to her, and asked her to read it. She changed my grade to an “A”.

I recall writing a few book reports/reviews on non-existent books when I was in high school and college. The titles and purported contents were total fabrications on my part. I was never “caught” nor did anyone challenge the validity.

I did it primarily as a joke and a creative writing exercise and to see if the teacher/professor would catch on … they never did.

One such review of an imaginary book actually got published and became the basis for a hoax that several of us ( including a couple of university professors ) perpetrated that went (inadvertently) national.

I can’t imagine what we could have accomplished if we’d had the internet in those days.

“The Mueller Report was the favorite book I ever read. I especially liked when he said Trump was innocent of all collusion despite the Fake news…”

cf Stanislaw Lem, “A Perfect Vacuum” and “Imaginary Magnitudes”.

From A.G. Macdonnell’s England, Their England, one of my favourite books:

“Read the publisher’s jacket first,” said Mr Harcourt, preaching his scandalous gospel. “That will usually give you the author’s name and some sort of idea of what the book is about. If the jacket says that the book is an illuminating, unique, sensational, thought-provoking exposé from within of the political situation in Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia, then the odds are about three to one that the book is about Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia. About once in four times they put the wrong cover on and you find that it’s a book of short stories called Tikkity-Tock, Old Fish! or a reprint of the Epistle to the Romans, but more often than not they get it right. Very well, then You’ve got the subject. You then look at the index of chapters. That gives you the scope of the book, shows you whether it covers the religious question, or gives a list of the hotels, or has a bit about peasant costumes, or goes in for trade statistics, or touches upon the proportion of illegitimate to legitimate kids. or sketches the history of the place since Attila, and so on. By this time you’ve got the whole substance of the book and then all you’ve got to do is to read the last two paragraphs of the last chapter, to see whether the author thinks that the Sub-Carpathian Ruthenians are good eggs or bad eggs, and there you are.”

Man, I could have used this information 40 years ago!