I’m sorry to hear that (both that she has passed, and that it wasn’t passed on); I’m getting mixed signals from my own brood (the oldest just entering high school). I push them to aim for high grades because I know the grades are overly generous to begin with (to combat “No Child Left Behind”); if my children had C averages I’d know they’d learned nothing at all (since nobody fails anymore).
I can’t get the youngest to read recreationally (not a problem with the others); hopefully we can change that. They mention a resurgence in comic books, which I was never into but any reading is better than none; one showed me a comic book he borrowed from a friend and it was much longer then the ones I remember as a kid (it was more like a real book than the magazine-types I remember).
MAD pretty much set a quizzical attitude to my basic thought processes.
If everything was as satirical as MAD was proposing (and I was an extremely fertile and receptive 13 or 14 year old) ... then the world was worth watching and knowing.
There were no computers then, just newspapers, TIME, my fathers Kiplinger .. etc., but it was all fascinating reading for me.
My wife came from rural Pa but loved the (common among girls at the time) imaginative love and romance first in Barbie, then in Harlequin and later longer novels
Marriage and work took away reading time, but not the desire and love of it.
Mostly we loved the exploration of our own imaginations.
Our children had their imaginations excised almost at birth with modern music making toys, and too early, hellivision.
I played in the dirt with my friends, sticks were guns and cars and a lot of 'em put together was a stockade and .... hours later, we realized we were hungry so we went home ... no one called us.
THAT America is gone ... and so is reading and using the imagination God gives His creation.
“Graphic novels” are being usied in schools to try to get kids to read the more “classic” books.