This Week in Reading December 16 - 22

Jane Austen heads the list of authors born this week. There have been been over forty movies made, and remade, of her novels, according to the Internet Movie Database, and films made from her novels by setting them in other times, (Clueless, Bride and Prejudice),and even a film about just reading the novels, (The Jane Austen Book Club), plus one about her life, (Becoming Jane). Masterpiece Theatre on PBS has shown several British made mini-series of Austen's works already but they've recently announced they are going to run The Complete Jane Austen starting on January 13th. In addition to productions of all six novels there will be one about Jane Austen herself, based on her letters.

Also born this week are literary wits, like playwright Noel Coward, George Santayana, H.H. Munro, Rebecca West, V.S. Pritchett, and William Safire. Poets are strong with John Greenleaf Whittier, Kenneth Rexroth, and Edwin Arlington Robinson. The week also gives us some very well known Science Fiction / Fantasy names with no less than Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, and Michael Moorcock.

This Week's Question: Which author born this week said "Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it"? You're right. No one said it that way. Who said it as "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Answer to Last Week's Question: The other author born last week who endured a trial by his government for what he wrote was Gustave Flaubert whose serialized Madame Bovary in 1856 was considered obscene for its portrayal of an adulterous woman. The trial lasted less than a month and Flaubert was acquitted. When it came out as a book it was an immediate bestseller.