'This gift that keeps on giving': Jonny Sun on the timelessness of Calvin and Hobbes

Jonny Sun is a humourist, doctoral student at MIT and author of Everyone's a Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too. One of his all-time favourite reads is Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson.

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Timeless tales

"They're books I go back to all the time. They were the absolute DNA of my childhood. I was reading those every year or every time I had some time off to look at them. It's just this gift that keeps on giving. It's this work that continues to unfold in different ways at different stages of your life."

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A source of inspiration

"I just fell in love with the silliness and the richness and also the depth and poignancy of a lot of these discussions and then growing up and getting older and older, I kept coming back to these strange high-concept twists and turns that Watterson pulls into the story, like the elements of childhood. He explores and celebrates the elements of imagination while also talking about some of the deeper questions in life and I consider it to be an extreme inspiration. I think I'll continue going back to it for as long as I live."

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Jonny Sun's comments have been edited and condensed.