This Week in Reading July 22 - 28

There are a few big name authors this week, two of them with the same very big name for adventure lovers, in fact. But the biggest Los Angeles name of all was born this week, Raymond Chandler, the creator of hardboiled detective Phillip Marlowe. Marlowe first appeared in stories, then novels by Chandler, and was played on screen in several famous movies, some of them scripted by Chandler.

From Contemporary Authors Online, available to Glendale Library cardholders through our Online Resources database called Biography Resource Center: Like Gardner and Hammett before him, Chandler drew on the irony of California's status as the Golden State and used the setting to suggest the beguiling and corruptive power of money in American life. Ultimately, Chandler presented a more provocative Los Angeles than had any of his predecessors. Nation contributor Thomas S. Reck called Chandler "the Los Angeles laureate," adding that "no city lends itself more to metaphor than Los Angeles, and no writer has risen to the implicit challenge better."

This Week's Question: What is the name of the of the substance or process that provides happiness in Aldous Huxley's 1932 classic Brave New World. To whom does it really provide happiness and how close are we to it today?

Answer to Last Week's Question: Hunter S. Thompson used factual interviews and personal experiences in a fictional setting thus driving his version of the truth wildly but insistently in a stronger fashion which was dubbed "gonzo journalism" by others. He later titled some of his own works The Gonzo Papers.