This Week in Reading July 20 - 26

This week ,and this time of year generally, just like late February and early March, give us many very well known writers whose births seem to be bunched together. There's an almost Stonehenge timing to things and one wonders if it's the ancient pattern of summer and harvest festivals bearing later fruit. Perhaps art follows seasonal agricultural cycles even as civilization moved to urban living. Perhaps also it's all coincidence.

Among the big names on the list who sold lots of books are Ernest Hemingway and Alexandre Dumas, Aldous Huxley, and George Bernard Shaw, Hart Crane and Cormac McCarthy. We have Carl Jung and Karl Menniger. For mystery fans there's no less than Los Angeles' own Raymond Chandler and Michael Connelly, along with John D. MacDonald. How about the biggest selling young adult author, S. E. Hinton? And that's not even half of the names you may recognize from the current list.

This Week's Question: How much are writers aware of other writers? Which author born this week boastfully assessed his literary skills with previous literary greats? "I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I've fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I have an edge in the last one. But nobody's going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I'm crazy or I keep getting better."

Answer to Last Week's Question: Probably few people know of the author of the novel series about Quakers which began with The Friendly Persuasion but many may know the movie. Jessamyn West grew up near Yorba Linda and was a Quaker though the novel, like most of her stories, was set in Indiana which she left at age six. She said, "Fiction reveals truths which reality obscures."

This Week in Reading July 22 - 28

There are a few big name authors this week, two of them with the same very big name for adventure lovers, in fact. But the biggest Los Angeles name of all was born this week, Raymond Chandler, the creator of hardboiled detective Phillip Marlowe. Marlowe first appeared in stories, then novels by Chandler, and was played on screen in several famous movies, some of them scripted by Chandler.

From Contemporary Authors Online, available to Glendale Library cardholders through our Online Resources database called Biography Resource Center: Like Gardner and Hammett before him, Chandler drew on the irony of California's status as the Golden State and used the setting to suggest the beguiling and corruptive power of money in American life. Ultimately, Chandler presented a more provocative Los Angeles than had any of his predecessors. Nation contributor Thomas S. Reck called Chandler "the Los Angeles laureate," adding that "no city lends itself more to metaphor than Los Angeles, and no writer has risen to the implicit challenge better."

This Week's Question: What is the name of the of the substance or process that provides happiness in Aldous Huxley's 1932 classic Brave New World. To whom does it really provide happiness and how close are we to it today?

Answer to Last Week's Question: Hunter S. Thompson used factual interviews and personal experiences in a fictional setting thus driving his version of the truth wildly but insistently in a stronger fashion which was dubbed "gonzo journalism" by others. He later titled some of his own works The Gonzo Papers.