This Week in Reading October 4 - 10

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature was announced this week, going to a Romanian-born novelist who lives in exile in Germany, Herta Muller. She writes, according to the Nobel committee, "with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, [to] depict ... the landscape of the dispossessed." Her novels, few of which have been translated into English yet, are about people constrained by a dictatorial Communist regime. Ms. Muller was forbidden from publication in her home country until she moved to Germany.

Authors born this week -

Nobel Prize in Literature
Story writer Ivo Andric (1961), novelist Claude Simon (1985), playwright Harold Pinter (2005)

Novelists and story writers
Alexis Kivi, Damon Runyon, Mario de Andrade, Caroline Jordan, R.K. Narayan, Jose Donoso, James Clavell, Rona Barrett, Marie-Claire Blais, Frederick Barthelme, Benjamin Cheever, Edward P. Jones, Jonathan Littell

Poets and Playwrights
Poets: Marina Tsvetaeva, Clive James, John Lennon, Diane Ackerman Playwrights: Joshua Logan, Amiri Baraka, Vaclaw Havel

Thinkers, Believers, Scientists, Historians, Biographers
Thinkers: Richard Rorty Believers: Jonathan Edwards, Phillip Berrigan, Jesse Jackson Scientists: R. D. Laing Historians: Walter Lord, Bill James Biographers: Jill Kerr Conway

Humorists, Essayists, Editors, Journalists, Officials, Media and Others
Humorists: Roy Blount, Joy Behar Essayists: William Zinsser Editors: Denis Diderot Journalists: Brendan Gill, Shana Alexander, Steve Coll, Dan Savage Officials: Media and Others: Giuseppi Verdi, Thor Heyerdahl, Oliver North

Mystery / Crime / Suspense Writers
Suspense: Joseph Finder

Fantasy / Science Fiction Writers
Horror: Anne Rice Science Fiction: Frank Herbert, David Brin

Romance / Historical Fiction Writers
Romance: Jackie Collins, Nora Roberts Historical Fiction: Thomas Keneally

Visual Artists
Graphic Novelists: Harvey Pekar Manga: Kazuki Takashashi Cartoonists: Bill Keane

Young People’s Writers
Children’s: James Whitcomb Riley, Louise Fitzhugh, R. L. Stine Teens: Sherman Alexie

Events to read about this week:
Tyndale prints the first Bible in English; the Gregorian Calendar gets rid of several days just to catch up; Sputnik, the world's first satellite is launched; the Naval Academy, Monty Python, PBS, the first talking movie, and Homeland security are also launched, along with the life of an Armenian film director. On the bad side, Chicago nearly burned down, a baseball team's players are banned from baseball whether they threw the World Series or not, and the US began its invasion of Afghanistan.

This Week’s Questions:

It's autumn now, and "the frost is on the punkin, and the fodder's in the shock." What? Who, born this week, wrote that and what does it mean? What other well known characters and other works came out of that writer's pen?

Answer to Last Week’s Questions:
Novelist, humanitarian Elie Wiesel and President, humanitarian Jimmy Carter, who were born last week, both won the Nobel Peace Prize. (President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace prize this week.)

Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin appointed Kay Ryan as U.S. Poet Laureate, and the Bancroft Library at UC, Berkeley, home of the Mark Twain papers and numerous rare books and manuscripts, is named after California historian George Bancroft.

Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood,banned in many places, made the

American Library Association’s list of Banned American Classics.

This Week in Reading April 12 - 18

This Week's names in the library.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Novelist Anatole France (1921), Playwright, novelist Samuel Beckett (1969), Poet Seamus Heaney (1995), Novelist J. M. G. LeClezio (2007)

Obituaries

American Library Association director of the Office of Intellectual Freedom, creator of Banned Books Week, Judith Krug (1940 – 2009)

Novelists and story writers

Henry James, Richard Harding Davis, Robert Walser, Isak Dinesen, Nella Larson, Eudora Welty, Kingsley Amis, John Braine, Cynthia Ozick, Scott Turow, Nick Hornby

Poets and Playwrights
Poets: Tristan Tzara Playwrights: Edward De Vere, Thomas Middleton, John Ford, Alexandre Ostrovski, John Millington Synge, Thornton Wilder, Lanford Wilson, Alan Ayckbourn

Thinkers, Spiritualists, Scientists, Historians, Biographers
Thinkers: Emile Durkheim George Lukacs Scientists: Thomas Szasz Historians: Niall Ferguson

Humorists, Essayists, Editors, Journalists, Officials, and Others
Journalists: Margaret Adler Officials: Thomas Jefferson Others: Clarence Darrow, Charlie Chaplin, Peter Ustinov, Erich von Daniken, David Letterman, Heloise, Linda Bloodworth-Thomason

Mystery / Crime / Suspense Writers
Mystery: Delores Gordon–Smith Suspense: Jeffrey Archer

Fantasy / Science Fiction Writers
Science Fiction: Boris Strugatsky, Keith R. A. deCandido, Bruce Sterling

Visual Artists
Illustrators: Garth Williams

Young People’s Writers
Children’s Authors: Beverly Cleary Teen Authors: Benjamin Zephaniah

Events to read about

Easter, Passover, important dates in dictionaries and atlases, art, space, baseball, Da Vinci, and Chaucer. Oh, and by the way, this is National Library Week. So it’s also Fine Free Week. Get your books back and take out some more.

This Week’s Questions: There are four Nobel prizewinners this week, so here’s a literature question in the form of an awkward logic puzzle.

Of these four, three lived in France, and two were born there, but only one was solely a French citizen. Who was it?

Two were born on the Emerald Isle but not in the same country. Why not?

Which two taught college courses in the French language and wrote their main works in the French language while living in English speaking countries?

Three wrote novels, one did not. Three wrote plays, one did not. Three wrote poems, one did not. Who did not, in each category?

[In honor of Judith Krug] One wrote works banned by the Index Liborum Prohibitorum (Index of Prohibited Books) even after he won the Nobel prize. Who was it? And what is that index?

Answer to Last Week’s Questions: (1) As young literary critic William Hazlitt effusively praised and became a devoted follower and welcome sycophant of poet William Wordsworth by saying of him: "He is in this sense the most original poet now living, and the one whose writings could the least be spared: for they have no substitute elsewhere."

(2) But years later an older Hazlitt found he could not, even for social reasons, refrain from criticizing a poem Wordsworth had written and so Wordsworth then said of him in a letter to a friend, “I hope that you do not associate with the fellow; he is not a proper person to be admitted into respectable society.” So much for professional courtesy.

(3) Often called a “decadent” poet, Algernon Charles Swinburne was also a formidable literary critic, who, on a trip to France, found the poems of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal to be irresistible. His effusive words popularized the French poet in the English speaking world: "It has the languid lurid beauty of close and threatening weather--a heavy, heated temperature, with dangerous hot-house scents in it; thick shadow of cloud closed about it, and fire of molten light.”