This Week in Reading September 14 - 20

Bestselling authors show up again this week and next. In fact, according to the New York Times, the grand dame of mystery writers, Agatha Christie, born on Monday, has "been outsold in volume only by Shakespeare and the Bible." Her birthday is celebrated there by a week of festivals and events around Britain. This year Christie fans are thrilled at the announcement Monday that thirteen hours of tape recordings have been discovered in which she speaks about her characters and her writing. They show Christie, daughter of an American man and English mother, to be quintessentially English. The recordings will be made available online eventually.

Other authors of note this week are London's great wit and dictionary maker, Samuel Johnson, and Nobelist William Golding. (You probably haven't heard of the other Nobel prizewinner this week.) For Americans there is James Fenimore Cooper, one of this country's first popular novelists, Upton Sinclair, whose anti-robber baron novel, Oil, was turned into last year's great movie There Will Be Blood, and the novelist / Merry Prankster Ken Kesey. We also get two outstanding poets, William Carlos Williams and Donald Hall, along with a gentle humorist of both pen and screen, Robert Benchley. Science fiction fans will celebrate venerables Norman Spinrad and Damon Knight. As always, there are many more than these on the list.

Also occuring this week, according to the New York Times, a major new playwriting prize to be presented every two years will be given Wednesday for the first time. It is the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award, nicknamed "the Mimi" after the female of the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust, and carries a stipend of $200,000. The first winner of the Mimi is Tony Kushner, the playwright of Angels in America, Homebody / Kabul and other plays, adaptations, and screenplays.

This Week's Question: Which highly quotable writer born this week said this? "The surest way to make a monkey out of a man is to quote him."

Answer to Last Week's Question: The minor planet "3836 Lem" was named in honor of Stanislaw Lem. Lem was known popularly as a science fiction author, however his writing transcended the pure entertainment aspects of the genre as he was concerned with philosophical and social problems as humankind dealt with new technology and the prospect of greater levels of intelligence.

This Week in Reading September 16 - 22

Authors born this week include names whose work you were probably assigned to read in school, William Golding, Upton Sinclair, Francis Parkman, Samuel Johnson, and poet William Carlos Williams. But it also gives us names of the authors we'd read without anyone asking us to, masters of imagination and suspense like H.G. Wells and Stephen King.

It's also a good week to read about civil rights because the United States Constitution was signed on September 17, 1787. In January the library will host a presentation and series of sessions with Dave Kluge, the author of The People's Guide to the United States Constitution, which is being published on Constitution Day this week. (Watch this space for more details as they become available.) Also think about those who have been prevented from enjoying such rights until declared free and about other countries whose people later became free and independent.

This Week's Question: While thinking about civil rights, when is Banned Books Week going to be celebrated at this library and in bookstores?

Answer to Last Week's Question: In "James Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" Mark Twain responded to critics in nineteenth century America and England who had called James Fenimore Cooper an artist based on their seemingly numerical assessments of his work. Tongue thoroughly in cheek, he says "Cooper's art has some defects. In one place in 'The Deerslayer', and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record."

Among these offenses: "That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere"; "that the personages in a tale, being both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there"; "the author shall ... use the right word, not its second cousin"; "eschew surplusage"; and "use good grammar." He goes to list other offenses and ends with "Counting these out, what's left is Art. I think we must all admit that."

Today's critics, however, have begun to look anew at Cooper's work and, as much as I agree with Twain, they say he was satirizing the pedestrian styles of literary criticism at the time, not the author per se. Some are re-assessing Cooper's importance to American literature. Coming soon to both libraries is Wayne Franklin's James Fenimore Cooper: the early years, the first of two such planned volumes.

This Week in Reading September 9 - 15

I really don't want to believe there are such things as astrological indications of character but how then do you explain that so many authors this week, more than any other week, came to be known by initials rather than full names? Born this week are D.H. Lawrence, H. L. Mencken, J.B. Priestley, O Henry, and the poet who signed her books and poems simply as H.D. (And next week we get H.G. Wells.) Why so many grouped on these days?

But a couple of big names appear in the list, too: Leo Tolstoy of monumental novel fame, (both meanings,) and Agatha Christie, who besides selling more books than anyone else, helped to sculpt a whole genre. Her sedate, wry, logic puzzle mysteries among decent sounding persons in villages, hotels, trains, and other gatherings have given way to police or private investigators in unsavory places and meeting less tasteful people today, but the amateur sleuth mystery that pleasures the Miss Marple reader still exists.

This Week's Question: James Fenimore Cooper, author of Last of the Mohicans, was also born this week. Who wrote "The Literary Offenses of James Fenimore Cooper"? Out of "115 literary offenses," how many did the critic say he committed? And does that assessment still hold true or are critics reassessing Cooper?

Answer to Last Week's Question: Jeffrey Eugenides' Pulitzer prizewinning second novel, Middlesex, is the current choice of Oprah's Book Club.