How heavy do you want your reading this week? If Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Soren Kierkegaard, and (the somewhat more accessible) philosophy of Jose Ortega y Gasset aren't dense enough for you, how about trying to get through a Thomas Pynchon novel? For your fine literature fix the essays and reviews of Edmund Wilson or the intertextual magical realism of Angela Carter are both challenging and yet satisfying, too.
But the book for true readers to enjoy is Alan Bennett's Uncommon Reader in which Queen Elizabeth simply decides to pick up a book and soon gets carried away into reading about society and people she never knew and this in turn disturbs those around her. Funny, a bit haughty, too. Sure, there's lighter fare for everyone, like Robin Cook and Barbara Taylor Bradford, and even Michael Palin's delightful travel writings, but it's a week for thiinking about how we live. Several political and history writers show up this week, too.
This Week's Question: Gaston Leroux's Phantom of the Opera has been adapted for stage and screen dozens, if not hundreds, of times but also may have been an adaptation itself of an earlier story by another writer. What is the source it may have come from? And what other recent work rewrote Leroux's story as a new novel with the same characters?No answer needed to last week's question if you did find something interesting to read at the Glendale Public Library. After all, that's what we're here for. Thanks for reading.
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