This Week in Reading November 8 - 14, 2009

Authors born this week -

Nobel Prize in Literature
Novelist Imre Kertesz

Novelists and story writers
Oliver Goldsmith, Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, Winston Churchill, Arnold Zweig, Margaret Mitchell, John Moore, Eric Malpass, Howard Fast, Kurt Vonnegut, Carlos Fuentes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Mary Gaitskill, Katherine Weber

Poets and Playwrights
Poets: Frederic Schiller, Jose Hernandez, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Vachel Lindsay, Anne Sexton Playwrights: Martha Gellhorn, Ronald Harwood, Garry Marshall, Wallace Shawn

Thinkers, Believers, Scientists, Historians, Biographers
Believers: Martin Luther, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz Scientists: Carl Sagan, Amory Lovins, Michael Fitzgerald Historians: Frederick Jackson Turner, C. Vann Woodward, Alistair Horne, Biographers: David Bret

Humorists, Essayists, Editors, Journalists, Officials, Media and Others
Humorists: Marc Favreau, P. J. O’Rourke Essayists: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Naomi Wolf, Ayaan Hirsi, Ali Editors and Critics: Roland Barthes Journalists: Dorothy Day, Harrison Salisbury, Morley Safer, Peter Arnett, Tracy Kidder Officials: Louis Brandeis, Barbara Boxer Media and Others: Whoopi Goldberg, Gordon Ramsay

Mystery / Crime / Suspense Writers
Mystery: John P. Marquand

Fantasy / Science Fiction Writers
Fantasy: Michael Ende, Neil Gaiman Science Fiction: Stephen Baxter

Romance / Historical Fiction Writers
Historical Fiction: F. van Wyck Mason

Visual Artists
Illustrators: William Hogarth Graphic Novelists: Rivkah Cartoonists: Bill Mantlo Manga: Mashashi Kishimoto

Young People’s Writers
Children’s: Jacob Abbott, Astrid Lindgren, William Steig Teens: Neal Shusterman

Events to read about this week:
The Bodelian Library, the Marine Corps, Teddy Bears, and Sesame Street get started; the Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone, and Moby Dick get published; Germany undergoes the Nazi Kristalnacht and the Berlin Wall falling down; the Mayflower Compact is made and Veterans are honored; Auguste Rodin, Claude Monet, Aaron Copeland, and George Patton are born; Tim Berners-Lee explains the World Wide Web.

This Week’s Questions:

This week gives us some major authors of classic gothic fiction. Today's sexually tinged vampires are currently the entertainment and publishing world's big thing. They are obviously drawn from Bram Stoker's classic Dracula, but Stoker himself was actually almost prudish and he would be surprised at what psychological traits could be seen to be lying underneath his character's surfaces.

In that vein, which other writer born this week, far beyond standard, had one character say the following to his inner double? "Either you or I, but both together is out of the question!" It may not be the one you think.

Answer to Last Week’s Questions:

"A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously." - Albert Camus

"A man said to the universe:

'Sir, I exist!'

'However,' replied the universe,

'The fact has not created in me

A sense of obligation." - Stephen Crane

"All art is a revolt against man's fate." - Andre Malraux