This Week in Reading July 6 - 12

It's hard to get back to work this week after a little time off. Many of the writers on the list right now are fantasists who skirt reality, others lose themselves in memories, some talk about getting away from the hustle and bustle, and even a president who's known not to be an overworker gives one no great incentive to be industrious. So, just sit back and pretend to work while you're reading until work itself takes over and forces you to fall into the stream of things.

The fantasists range from Anne Radcliffe and Mervyn Peake to David Eddings, Jeff Vandermeer and Dean Koontz. The last also writes in other genres, especially mysteries where he is joined this week by Donald Westlake. We also see Marcel Proust whose seven novel great work began with a simple remembered taste of a childhood cookie. Henry David Thoreau got away from it all but he did have to work at it once he got there. Other literary names this week are Anna Quindlen, Alice Munro, and Harold Bloom (who writes about and edits literature but doesn't write necessarily literarily.) And, as most weeks have, the Nobel prizewinner this week is Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.

This Week's Question: Who, born this week, advised writers to "Be obscure clearly"?

Answer to Last Weeks Question: Unlike Barbara Cartland, the famous romance novelist born this week who said "We romance writers are there to make people feel, not think", Nathaniel Hawthorne's idea of a "romance" was not a simple story of love, but a dark, complex tale with both thinking and feeling. He said "Easy reading is damned hard writing." Romanticism was the name of the nineteenth century literary and artitistic movement to which he's been associated.

This Week in Reading July 15 - 21

Among the anniverseries this week is the Riot Act. Authorities in England in the early 1700s were required to "read the Riot Act" to people disturbing the peace and many of us have heard the phrase without understanding what it was. We have our own, by the way, the Library Riot Act:

"Our sovereign, the reading king, chargeth and commandeth all persons, being noisily assembled, immediately to disperse themselves, and peaceably to depart to their literary habitations, or to their lawful school business, upon the pains contained in the act made in the first year of blog reading, for preventing tumults and riotous assemblies. Quiet reading saves the library."

On the other hand, if you take out books and read at home you can gasp, sigh, cry, laugh, and speak back to the book to your heart's content. Authors and events this week will cause strong emotions one way or the other.

It's particularly important to see that this week marks the founding of the women's rights movement in America and also includes the nomination of a woman to the vice-presidency, and includes notable women from Phyllis Diller to Diana Rigg, Mary Baker Eddy to Iris Murdoch, and from Ida B. Wells to Arianna Huffington. Throw in Hemingway, McLuhan, and Derrida and that's not even half of this big week in reading which also includes poets, political leaders, satirists, novelists, mystery writers, athletes, artists, movie stars, and more.

This week's Question: To which author born this week is the term "Gonzo" applied?

Answer to last week's question: Marcel Proust's great multivolume work is often translated into English as Remembrance of Things Past: Swann's Way, Within a Budding Grove, The Guermantes Way, Cities of the Plain, The Captive, The Sweet Cheat Gone, and The Past Recaptured. It begins with the taste of a pastry that reminds the narrator of his childhood and the rest of the books follow these memories in great detail. E.M. Forster called it "an epic of curiosity and despair" but Andre Maurois said Proust had plumbed the extremes of human misery but, like Shakespeare, had found serenity." (From Contempory Authors Online, through Biography Resource Center.) The library has them all, but in various editions.

This Week in Reading July 8 - 14

We settle in for a more normal summer week after the disruption of a midweek holiday and find that the authors born this week in July still include Nobel prizewinners like Pablo Neruda and Isaac Bashevis Singer. They range from fabulists and visionaries who toil in the farther fields of imagination to those who carefully choose their words and care how they look on the page.

This Week's Question: Marcel Proust, in ill health, spent the last three years of his life in his cork-lined bedroom. He wrote À la recherche du temps perdu. What is that title (usually) in English and what are the titles of the seven volumes it contains?

Answer to Last Week's Question: The centennial exhibition of the works of Frida Kahlo is currently in Mexico City at http://www.museobellasartes.artte.com/.