This Week in Reading October 5 - 11, 2008

There are three Nobel prizewinners this week yet it is unlikely that many of us have heard of more than one of them. Francois Mauriac, who is known for writing about the life of Jesus, is only one of two French novelists born this week to win the Literature prize; the other is Claude Simon. Serbo-Croation novelist Ivo Andric is the third.

Otherwise there are writers from around the world with a few bestseller names among them, hugely successful romance writer Nora Roberts, who also writes mysteries as J. D. Robb, fiction, mystery and western author Elmore Leonard, who also gives writers advice, adventure novelist James Clavell, horror novelist Clive Barker, and historian-novelist Thomas Keneally.

This Week's Question: Significantly, this week is when the Nobel prizes are given out. Last year's prize went to England's Doris Lessing. The one for literature this year will be announced Thursday, October 9. Will it be someone you have read? Or will it not be given out this year?

Answer to Last Week's Question: The two authors from last week that most appeared on lists of books banned in America were Truman Capote and Ann Rice. Capote's novel In Cold Blood was on the list of Top 100 Novels and was banned for its violence, profanity, and sex. Ann Rice writing as A. N. Roquelaure had the 53rd most frequently challenged book between 1990 - 2000 for her erotic Sleeping Beauty trilogy. The first novel in the series sold more copies than Rice's Interview with the Vampire and many of our nation's library copies of her books from this era are now missing or lost. Rice has recently returned to her religious roots, and after being "called out of darkness" writes bestsellers about the life of Jesus now.

This Week in Reading June 22 - 28

Officially Summer now, this week's list of authors begins and ends with adventure and suspense as it probably should. H. Rider Haggard's novels and stories of colonialist adventurers have been made into countless movies. Eric Ambler was one of the most widely read suspense writers of his era, and the success of his amateur-who-gets-caught-up-with-spys novels brought him to live in Los Angeles as a successful screenwriter.

Two more highly successful suspense novelists were born this week. Lawrence Block has written dozens of mystery novels in at least five series. Dan Brown's Angels and Demons is currently about to be filmed as a follow up to his blockbuster DaVinci Code.

Pearl S. Buck wrote family sagas based on her Chinese missionary childhood that were so good she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature. And let us not forget, (though we did at first), that this week gives us George Orwell, as well.

This Week's Question: What other author born this week won the Nobel Prize in literature?

Answer to Last Week's Question: Jean Paul Sartre won the Nobel prize in Literature but turned it down. His questions in existential philosophy underlie his most famous novel Nausea. That "sweet sickness" happens to his protagonist who grows to despise his (and every one else's) physical existence but learns that he must live with it, including the Self Taught Man who was reading every book in the library in alphabetical order. Often related to the problem encountering Hamlet, both this book and Oblamov, written many years earlier in Russia by Ivan Goncharov, find their characters faced with "to be or not to be." Oblamov eventually answered no, but Sartre's Antoine, has to say yes.