This Week in Reading January 6 -12, 2008

This week runs the gamut from Carl Sandburg and Kahlil Gibran to Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern. What can one say about that range? Perhaps it's fitting since this is also the fictional week that HAL, the 2001 spaceflight computer gone bad, was born. In fact, HAL, Limbaugh, and Stern share the same day, January 12. But so do Jack London, Edmund Burke, and Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com. Fortunately E. L. Doctorow, Zora Neale Hurston, Robinson Jeffers, and William James keep this week's list more intellectually balanced.

This week's question: Which author born this week discovered the public library and was mentored in reading and writing by librarian, Ina Coolbrith, who was called by that person "literary mother"?

Answer to last week's question: It would have seemed reasonable to guess that Rudyard Kipling "was the single most widely read English speaking author throughout the world" during the early part of the twentieth century but the words were written about Stephen Leacock, the conservative Canadian humorist widely reprinted in magazines and newspapers.