[asinclair]

I never used Cliff Notes. Not because I couldn't, but because I never needed them. I grew up in a house full of books, and learned to read VERY early in life. (I HATED being read to as a kid -- I wanted to do it myself!) There was very little that I would not read.

That said, I did master the art of reading five pages at more-or-less random and write a book report. I had (and have) a big problem with procrastination.

I HATED Dick and Jane in first and second grade because it was so thin and simple.

[HartleyMBaldwin]

Same here, in all respects. All six of us kids learned to read by age 4 (our mother taught us, using phonics), and I read everything I wanted to read, including my siblings’ school-assigned reading. No Cliffs Notes needed, and no Classic Comics either.

We had several thousand books in the house, including a great many of the classics. There was no nonsense about a book being “too old” for a child. If you didn’t understand everything in it at the time, you’d pick up more when you reread it a few years later.

I still remember finishing my second-grade reader on the first day of class and wondering what we were going to read next.

[imardmd1]

My English teacher became incensed when I turned in yet another Zane Grey book report. Read every one of them. To allay her badgering to broaden my scope, I read through "Anna Karenina" (which context incensed my parents that I would read that kind of adultery-promoting romance, with the emphasis on the "adult" part) so detailed that, while giving me an A, she had to hide it from the rest of the class until the school year was over.

i still liked the tantalizing but upright characters of Zane Grey's Western love stories. No effeminate men, good or bad, in them. Didn't learn even what the term meant, from either Grey or Tolstoy novels.

(Later on, my kids and I read just about all of Louis Lamour's Western pot-boilers, as well. Great character-building influence, for the boy or girl.)