This Week in Reading March 30 - April 5

It's finally April this week. College basketball wraps up and the baseball season begins. It is time many will let go of old disappointments and begin new hopes. But it is also a month for poets, librarians, writers, and readers to clean the dust off of the old and look upon it with new eyes. The authors born this week are mostly among the old. Only Al Gore and a children's author are relatively new, and that's just relatively . From Descartes and Hobbes to Milan Kundera and Donald Barthelme, the rest are names from the past. At least one has won the Nobel Prize, the Chilean poet and story writer, Gabriela Mistral.

If you haven't taken home a classic lately come into the library and find one; we'll help you choose. We have plenty. If you want to find a new author, browse our New Book shelves for a new genre or style of book you haven't tried before. It will be good for your brain fitness.

This Week's Question: April is also National Poetry Month in America. Who is your favorite poet? What is your favorite poem? Comment on the blog and tell us. We will post the results, if we get any, throughout the month. No prizes will be awarded, but sharing the joy of poetry with others will make you and the people you may turn on to your favorites very happy.

Answer to Last Week's question: It was Charlotte and Emily's younger sister, Anne Bronte, who, in 1848, wrote a reply to the romanticist critics who wanted everything written about to be nice rather than to reflect reality, in her introduction to the second edition of her second and last novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: "To represent a bad thing in its least offensive light, is, doubtless, the most agreeable course for a writer of fiction to pursue; but is it the most honest, or the safest?" She went on to offer another phrase we often hear, and one which speaks for a good many things these days as well as nearly two hundred years ago: "Oh, reader! if there were less of this delicate concealment of facts - this whispering, 'Peace, peace,' when there is no peace, there would be less of sin and misery .." Sigh. It is ever thus in some circles of life, in love, in politics, and in war.