Wednesday, July 29, 2009

This Week in Reading July 26 - August 1

Authors born this week -

Nobel Prize in Literature
Poet Giosue Carducci (1906), playwright, novelist George Bernard Shaw (1925), novelist Eyvind Johnson (1974)


Novelists and story writers
Richard Henry Dana, Jr, Emily Bronte, Herman Melville, Alexandre Dumas fils, Vladimir Korolenko, Booth Tarkington, Aldous Huxley, Paul Gallico, Joseph Mitchell, Malcolm Lowry, Primo Levi, Elizabeth Hardwick, Edwin O’Connor, Ana Maria Matute, Cees Nooteboom, Patrick Modiano, Harry Mulisch, Chang-rae Lee


Poets and Playwrights
Poets: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Antonio Machado, Stanley Kunitz, Anne Hebert, John Ashbery, Michael Longely, Jim Carroll Playwrights: Dean Pitchford

Thinkers, Believers, Scientists, Historians, Biographers
Thinkers: Thorstein Veblen, Jean Baudrillard, Pierre Bourdieu, John Searle Believers: Helena Blavatsky Scientists: Carl Jung Historians: C. Northcote Parkinson, Ken Burns Biographers: Andre Maurois, Rick Bragg

Humorists, Essayists, Editors, Journalists, Officials, Media and Others
Humorists: Don Marquis, Jean Shepherd, Carol Leifer Essayists: Alexis de Tocqueville, Milton Friedman, Vincent Canby, William J. Bennett, Richard Roeper Journalists: Howard Kurtz Officials: Pat Schroeder Media and others: Melvin Belli, Peter Jennings, Anita Hill, Alton Brown

Mystery / Crime / Suspense Writers
Mystery:
Brett Halliday Suspense: Jack Higgins

Fantasy / Science Fiction Writers
Fantasy:
Cherie Priest Science Fiction: Steve Miller


Visual Artists
Cartoonists:
Jim Davis

Young People’s Writers
Children’s:
Beatrix Potter, Hillaire Belloc, Ernst Jandl, Lynn Reid-Banks, Jan Berenstain, J. K. Rowling Teens: Cat Bauer, James St. James

Events to read about this week:
What's the shortest way with dissenters? Which was worse, the way Daniel Defoe was treated centuries ago, or the way US veterans were treated in the last century? The movies gave us cartoons, a film director, music videos, and a governor. There are two Henrys, two unionists, a Yankee and a flag wagging composer, a killer and a life saver.

Obituaries
Novelist E. Lynn Harris, 54



This Week’s Questions:

How's your summer reading going? Remember that the Adult Summer Reading Program goes on through September 8. Are you dropping off your brief reviews at a library reference desk for the weekly drawings and grand prize drawing?

"In literature, as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others." The first modern paperback book was published this week in 1935. Which author, born this week, wrote it, and said that quote? What was the title and who published it?

Answer to Last Week’s Questions:
"It’s hard enough writing books without having to explain them."Ernest Hemingway


"In the long run, however little you talk or even think about it, the most durable thing in writing is style ..." Raymond Chandler

"Clear prose indicates the absence of thought."Marshall McLuhan

"In everything that be called art, there is a quality of redemption. There may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid."Raymond Chandler

"I get this crazy feeling. Every once in a while I get it. I get the feeling that this is the last time in history when the offbeats like me will have a chance to live free in the nooks and crannies of the huge and rigid structure of an increasingly codified society. Fifty years from now I would be hunted down in the street. They would drill little holes in my skull and make me sensible and reliable and adjusted."John D. MacDonald

"She walked into my office on legs as long as one of those long-legged birds that you see in Florida - the pink ones, not the white ones - except that she was standing on both of them, not just one of them, like those birds, the pink ones, and she wasn't wearing pink, but I knew right away that she was trouble, which those birds usually aren't." - Eric Rice, 2009 winner in the Detective category of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest (Compared to Chandler's more prosaic line from Farewell, My Lovely: "It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick out a hole in a stained glass window."

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