This Week in Reading November 22 - 28

Authors born this week -

Nobel Prize in Literature
Novelist Andre Gide (1947)

Novelists and story writers
Laurence Sterne, George Eliot, Carlo Collodi, Eca de Queiros, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Helen Hooven Santmyer, Dawn Powell, Nancy Mitford, Jin Ba, Alberto Moravio, James Agee, Randolph Stow, Marilynne Robinson, Alexis Wright, Arturo Perez, Ahmadou Koroouma, Arundhati Roy

Poets and Playwrights
Poets: William Cowper, William Blake, Alexandr Blok, Paul Celan Playwrights: Felix Lope de Vega, Stefan Zweig, Guy Bolton. Eugene Ionesco, Garson Kanin

Thinkers, Believers, Scientists, Historians, Biographers
Thinkers: Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Engels, Claude Levi Strauss Believers: John Bunyan, Hal Lindsey Scientists: Norbert Weiner, Lewis Thomas, Keith Ablow Historians: Charles A. Beard, Jennifer Michael Hecht Biographers: John Bigelow, Ishmael Beah

Humorists, Essayists, Editors, Journalists, Officials, Media and Others
Humorists: Terry Gilliam, Bruce Vilanch, Jon Stewart Essayists: Dale Carnegie, William F. Buckley, Jr., Guy Davenport, Gail Sheehy, Harry Edwards, Dervla Murphy, Thomas B. Kohnstamm Editors and Critics: Thomas Cook, Ward Morehouse Journalists: Gail Collins, Caroline Kennedy Officials: Gary Hart, Chuck Schumer Media and Others: Harpo Marx, Ben Stein, Dick Morris, Sam Seder

Mystery / Crime / Suspense Writers
Mystery: Robert Barnard, Valerie Wilson Wesley

Fantasy / Science Fiction Writers
Fantasy: L. Sprague De Camp, Victor Pelevin, Steven Brust Science Fiction: Nelson Slade Bond, Forrest J. Ackerman, Frederick Pohl, Poul Anderson, Spider Robinson

Romance / Historical Fiction Writers
Historical Fiction: Nigel Tranter

Visual Artists
Graphic Novelists: Roy Thomas, Marjane Satrapi, John Kovalic Cartoonists: Charles Schulz, Roz Chast

Young People’s Writers
Children’s: P. D. Eastman, Tom Ungerer, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Henkes, Jenna Bush

Events to read about this week:
Happy Thanksgiving, thanks to Andrew Carnegie for all the library buildings, but President Kennedy and Harvey Milk were assassinated; while Life magazine, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, and Motown's Berry Gordon all started life.

This Week’s Questions:

Which author born this week said this?: "Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out."

Of which other one was the following said?: " ... difficult art at its best is so fine, so beautifully a-shimmer with wit and nonsense and gaity, that it creates a standard of its own."

Answer to Last Week’s Questions:

Humorist, columnist Franklin Pierce Adams, who is responsible for the librarian - like quote among dozens of others, and comic playwright George S. Kaufmann were both founding members of the Algonguin Round Table of wits in New York in the 1920s and 1930s. Comic actor Harpo Marx, born this week, became a member as well though he never published anything, nor let the general public hear what he had to say, until he published his autobiography, Harpo Speaks. It is one of the most enjoyable bios ever, showing that he belonged there among the literary wits.

This Week in Reading January 27 - February 2

We're getting into some of the most populated weeks for author births with some fascinating names this week and in the next two. Does it mean some of the best selling authors are Aquarians? Probably not as popular writers are spread all over the calendar but it does make you wonder what was happening nine months prior that so many with wide appeal appear in the last weeks of January and most of February. Oh, that's right, it was Spring, where thoughts run to ...

There are authors and others with wide appeal in several fields like Norman Mailer, Zane Grey, Paddy Chayevsky, Oprah Winfrey, S. J. Perelman, John O'Hara, Barbara Tuchman, Langston Hughes, and James Dickey. There are those who appeal to more specialized literary tastes like James Joyce, playwright Anton Chekhov, and science fiction writer Yevgeny Zamyatin. For politicos there is Thomas Paine and even commentator Keith Olbermann this week. And there are a lot more names than even these. (This week links currently only to January 27 - January 31 as we're relinking starting on February 1 to just four static weeks a month. You can find Feb. 1 and 2 on the Past Weeks pull down menu above. We're updating and correcting as we go, however.)

This Week's Question: In August of 1814, during the War of 1812, British troops burned the Capitol building in Washington, DC, that housed the original Library of Congress. Immediately thereafter, Ex-President Thomas Jefferson, who had spent fifty years collecting books, offered his personal collection to Congress to begin a new library. On January 30, 1815, after much debate about whether his wide-ranging interests suited a legislative library, Congress accepted them. Jefferson wrote "I do not know that it contains any branch of science which Congress would wish to exclude from their collection; there is, in fact, no subject to which a Member of Congress may not have occasion to refer." That universality of interest lies behind the Library of Congress still today and it has become the world's largest library with over 130 million items in over 460 languages. How many books did Jefferson give to the library to start it up again?

Answer to last week's question: What was the Bloomsbury group? In the early years of the twentieth century America had its Algonquin Roundtable of cosmopolitan wits in New York who quipped with little more than incidental social consciousness, and Paris had its disillusioned Lost Generation of expatriates who tried to acheive a European sophistication beyond simple morality and social standing. London at the time, however, had its own earlier intellectual community of upper class writers, artists and thinkers called the Bloomsbury circle or group. Very much influenced by the impressionist painters, belle epoque arts, and critical of war and capitalism, the group began as a clique of upper class collegiate classmates moved into the Bloomsbury section of London and lived a bohemian lifestyle devoted to art and ethics. This was decades before American beatniks and hippies began to channel them. The names of Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster and economist John Maynard Keynes were current among American intellectuals of the 1960s when Edward Albee entitled his play about academic relationships Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

This Week in Reading November 18 - 24

Thanksgiving is early this year on the 22nd. Next year Thanksgiving will be five days later, on the 27th, giving us less time to buy books as holiday gifts, but at least it won't seem like the holiday commercials, tree lots, and store displays are coming too early like they are this year.

This week's authors are a varied lot but you'll have to scroll down toward the later part of the list to get to the bigger names. Voltaire didn't write that much but what he put his naive Candide through in Dr. Pangloss' "best of all possible worlds" spoke volumes, nudging those who chose to become enlightened away from the powerful forces of greed and authoritarian destruction of the human spirit toward a more reasoned, egalitarian and humane future.

An English contemporary Laurence Sterne, on the other hand, gave us nine volumes of one novel but it, too, also had an innocent at its center. Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman has been both praised and reviled for being an unplotted, untidy, unending accumulation of whatever was on Sterne's mind, but most of it was fine comedy with some satire and I feel he was just centuries ahead of his time. If you read his novel like it was an Internet blog site you log onto every week or so you can enjoy the whole thing by skipping the tedious parts. I don't think he intended anything less.

The biggest name of the week is probably George Eliot, who wasn't a man, and who is often in danger of being ignored today because of having written Silas Marner which every high schooler used to be forced to read. However, Mary Anne Evans was a great writer and you haven't read Middlemarch consider taking it up. Especially if you'e grown up now. Eliot and Hardy do get better with age.

This Week's Question: A personal note, here: Harpo Speaks (co-authored by Rowland Barber) was my favorite biography of any I ever read. The only reason we didn't hear Harpo Marx in the movies was because of his Bronx accent, not because he didn't have things to say. He was as lovable as you imagine, and while not as bookish as his brother Groucho Marx, he was a more welcome friend to the writers at the Algonguin Roundtable and a real member of their "Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club." Who were some of the writers at the club and what was the other name by which it was called?

Answer to Last Week's Question: After all his other travels and at the age of forty, Robert Louis Stevenson bought 400 acres on the Samoan island of Upolu in the South Pacifc and settled in with his wife and family. He died there and was buried there just four years later. Who knows what other books he would have written.