This Week in Reading August 3 - 9

This is a week which many of us would rather forget but there were events which must be remembered so that some of them may not happen again. In this week the United States dropped atomic bombs on civillians twice, in this week years later another war which was not supposed to be a war got extended from dubious actions; in this week one president resigned and another made union members resign; in this week the concept of freedom of the press was engrained on the early American character but also in this week over two hundred years later the fairness doctrine was cancelled by the FCC. It was also the week of some of the most notorious Manson murders.

There are, however, a few literary names to note this week. English poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Alfred, Lord Tennyson top the list. Crime fans celebrate the birthdays of P. D. James and Jonathan Kellerman. And somewhere there may be a connection between the short stories of Guy de Maupassant and the radio sketches of Garrison Keillor but it may only be the length of each's chosen medium.

This Week's Question: All is not bad this week. The Sistine Chapel opened, the NBA was formed, the World Wide Web was begun, and several fascinating people had birthdays. Yet still, the Glendale Central Library has had to change hours due to city budget restrictions. What are the new hours for the Central Library and your favorite branch?

Answer to last week's question: And as bad as all that was that happened this week, we also put up the wrong information for the weeks of August 1 -7 on our Books and Reading page so you couldn't have answered last week's question if you tried. It will be fixed, however, by the time you read this. We sincerely apologize for the error, (But in fairness it was the perversity of the commercial programming that blew out our local style guide.) Hoping to trick you into thinking Baldwin Park was named after James Baldwin, (it wasn't), the city in California actually named for a writer born last week is Orange County's Dana Point which was specifically named for the nineteenth century writer Richard Henry Dana who wrote about landing there as a sailor in Two Years Before the Mast.