This Week in Reading May 3 - 9

Nobel Prize in Literature
Novelist Henryk Seinkiewicz (1905), novelist, poet Rabindranath Tagore (1913), novelist Wladislaw Reymont, (1924), novelist, poet, playwright Harry Martinson (1974)

Obituaries
Marilyn French (1929 - 2009) was the author of The Women's Room, Her Mother's Daughter, and was an important and active voice of feminism. Her most recent work was a three volume academic work, From Eve to Dawn: a history of women,.

Authors born this week -

Novelists and story writers
Alain Rene Le Sage, Gaston Leroux,, Dodie Smith, Romain Gary, Sloan Wilson, Thomas Pynchon, Nelida Pinon, Amos Oz, Peter Carey, Graham Swift, David Guterson, Almudena Grandes

Poets and Playwrights
Poets: Robert Browning, Archibald MacLeish, Mona Van Duyn, Yehuda Amichai, Gary Snyder, Charles Simic Playwrights: J. M. Barrie, William Inge, Betty Comden, Alan Bennett

Thinkers, Believers, Scientists, Historians, Biographers
Thinkers: Soren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Richard Wollheim, Martha Nussbaum Believers Fulton J. Sheen Scientists: Thomas Henry Huxley, Sigmund Freud, David Attenborough Historians: H. H. Bancroft,, T. H. White, Theodore Sorenson

Humorists, Essayists, Editors, Journalists, Officials, and Others
Essayists: Edmund Wilson, George Will, Naomi Klein Journalists: Harry Golden, Mike Wallace, Tim Russert Officials: Niccolo Machiavelli, Harry S. Truman Media and others: Andy Adams, James Beard, Norman Corwin, Orson Welles, Pete Seeger, Don Rickles, Robert Osborne, Michael Palin, Kurt Loder

Mystery / Crime / Suspense Writers
Mystery: Christopher Morley, Ben Eliton Suspense: Peter Benchley: Robin Cook

Fantasy / Science Fiction Writers
Fantasy: Richard Adams, Angela Carter Science Fiction William Tenn

Visual Artists
Photographers: Jacob Riis

Young People’s Writers
Children’s: Milton Meltzer, Andrew Clements, Robin Jarvis

Events to read about this week:
Freedom Riders, the Kent State shootings, Cinco de Mayo, the Hindenburg Disaster, Nixon’s impeachment hearings begin.

This Week’s Questions

Which of this week’s authors said the following?

“Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive.”

“All poetry is putting the infinite with the finite.”

"Words make love on the page like flies in the summer heat and the poet is only the bemused spectator."

“The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.”

Answer to Last Week’s Questions:

Dean of Science Fiction. -- Jack Williamson
Father of Space Operas. – E. E. Smith.
Laws of Science Fiction. -- Larry Niven

Among Niven's Laws, “There is no cause so right that one cannot find a fool following it.”

“There exists minds that think as you do, but differently.” (Niven’s Collolary “The gene-tampered turkey you’re talking to isn’t one of them.” )

Niven’s 'laws for writers of science fiction' include

“Writers who write for other writers should write letters.”

“It’s a sin to waste the reader’s time.”

While E. E. Smith particularly credits the public library with inspiring his science fiction imagination, Robert J. Sawyer has been the Science Fiction Writer-in-Residence at several Canadian public libraries. That country’s program also allows for Mystery Writer-in-Residence and representatives of other genres who give writing workshops to the public in addition to speaking programs such as we have in our One Book – One Community programs in this country.

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.”

This Week in Reading April 5 - 11

Literary names of note this week

Nobel Prize in Literature: Poet Gabriela Mistral (1945)

Novelists and story writers
Sandor Marai, John Fante, Glendon Swarthout, Arthur Hailey, Hugo Claus, Donald Barthelme, Paul Theroux, Barry Levinson, Barbara Kingsolver, Joolz Denby

Poets and Playwrights
Poets: Christopher Smart, William Wordsworth, Charles Baudelaire, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Johannes Bobrowski, Mark Strand Playwrights: Clare Boothe Luce

Thinkers, Spiritualists, Scientists, Historians, Biographers
Philosophers: Thomas Hobbes, Edmund Husserl Historians: David Halberstam

Humorists, Essayists, Editors, Journalists, Officials, and Others
Humorists: Leo Rosten Essayists: William Hazlitt, Booker T. Washington, Montague Summers, Lev Kopelev Journalists: Lincoln Steffens, Lowell Thomas, Walter Winchell, Tony Brown, Vladimir Pozner, Seymour Hersh, David Frost, Ellen Goodman, David Helvarg Officials: Jerry Brown, Christopher Darden Others: Linda Goodman, Hugh Hefner, Robert Kiyosaki, Julia Phillips, Neil Boortz

Mystery / Crime / Suspense Writers
Suspense: David Westheimer

Fantasy / Science Fiction Writers
Fantasy: Robert Bloch, Mike Ford Science Fiction: Henry Kuttner, James White, James Patrick Kelly

Visual Artists
Photographers: Eadweard Muybridge

Events to read about, as always.

This Week’s Questions:

There're more journalists than anything this week and LA novelist John Fante is getting his centennial, but April is Poetry Month, after all. Come in to see our display.

(1) Which author born this week said this about a poet born this week when they became friends?

"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) And what did that poet say about that author when they no longer were friends?

(3) Which poet born this week is credited with “discovering” and making famous the poems of which other poet this week?


Answers to Last Week’s Question:

(1) Maya Angelou said she aspired to be the first, black, American Proust, and was born in Saint Louis. Marge Piercy was born in Detroit and wanted to change the world by bringing people to consciousness. Both wrote poetry and are strong advocates of women's rights and civil rights.

(2) Probably most American-bred readers know from childhood that Washington Irving created the headless horseman who chased mild mannered schoolteacher Ichabod Crane around Sleepy Hollow in the early 1800s. But they don’t likely know about the other one. People whose families come from Russia or other countries know about Mayne Reid’s Headless Horseman , a novel based on a Texas folk tale about "el Muerto", the headless corpse of a defeated soldier placed on a steed set to run to scare the enemy.

The reason for this is, though Reid was one of America’s most prolific pulp fiction storytellers in the nineteenth century between Poe and Twain, his fame did not succeed him in this country, and he was largely forgotten. Very few libraries in America have any of his once cheap books. However, several of his novels were translated into Russian and advertised there as the work of “America’s favorite author.” If he was, it was only for a time.

This Week in Reading March 29 - April 4

Literary Names of Note This Week

Nobel Prize in Literature: Poet Octavio Paz (1990)

Novelists and story writers: Antoine Prrevost, Washington Irving, Mayne Reid, Nikolai Gogol, Emile Zola, Edgar Wallace, Ernst Junger, Roberto Arlt, Marcel Ayme, Margarite Duras, John Fowles, Milan Kundera, Tom Sharpe, John Jakes, Judith Rossner, Judith Guest, Marge Piercy.

Poets and Playwrights: George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Edward Everett Hale, Edward Fitizgerald, Paul Verlaine, Maya Angelou / Edmond Rostand, Sean O’Casey, Howard Lindsay, Robert E. Sherwood, Rolf Hochhuth.

Thinkers, Spiritualists, Scientists, Historians, Officials: Mose Maimonides, Rene Descartes, Camille Paglia, A.C. Grayling / John Burroughs, Abraham Maslow, Jane Goodall / William Manchester / Al Gore.

Humorists, Essayists, Editors, Journalists, Biographers, and Others: Eric Idle, Amy Sedaris / Ted Morgan, Herb Caen, Kenneth Tynan / Giacomo Casanova, Kittty Kelley / Leo Buscaglia.

Mystery / Crime / Suspense Writers: Dan Simmons.

Fantasy / Science Fiction Writers: Anne McCaffrey, Samuel R. Delaney.


Romance / Historical Fiction Writers: George McDonald Fraser.


Graphic Novelists / Cartoonists / Illustrators: Sandra Boynton / Steven T. Seagle.

Children’s / Teen Authors: Hans Christian Andersen, Anna Sewell,, Mark Shulman.

As always, a week of events to read about.

This Week’s Questions: 1) This week many Glendale High School students need to find out about an author for a current assignment. At least two born this week are among the favorites asked about at the Central Library Reference Desk and branches. Here’s a little about both writers.

One intended to “become America’s first black female Proust," the other wanted “to change consciousness … to imagine a better world.”

Both had difficult lives; one was born in Detroit, the other in Saint Louis. They both wrote poetry as well as fiction, and both became spokespersons for civil rights and women’s issues. Who are they?

You can find out much about these two and many other authors or poets in Biography Resource Center and Magill on Literature in Glendale Public Library Online Resources with your library card number. There are biographies, bibliographies, and analyses of their work, with pictures!

2) Two authors born this week both wrote stories about headless horsemen. Who are they?

Answers to Last Week’s Question:

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Poem – Robert Frost – The Death of the Hired Hand

“Everybody, my friend, everybody lives for something better to come. That's why we want to be considerate of every man— Who knows what's in him, why he was born and what he can do?” Play – Maxim Gorky – The Lower Depths

“And now the fancy passes by and nothing will remain, and miles around they'll say that I am quite myself again.“ Poem – A. E. Housman – A Shropshire Lad

“Every day a little sting, in the heart and in the head.” Poetic lyrics in a play – Stephen Sondheim – A Little Night Music

“All pretty girls are a trap, a pretty trap, and men expect them to be.” Play – Tennessee Williams – The Glass Menagerie

“The pennycandystore beyond the El is where I first fell in love with unreality.” Poem – Lawrence Ferlinghetti – A Coney Island of the Mind