This Week in Reading September 21 - 27

Ancient Greek playwright Euripides, fantasists H. G. Wells and Stephen King, literary lights F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, and poet T. S. Eliot, (the last two Nobel prizewinners) make this week a strong one for well known authors. It is also the week of the birth of the American Bill of Rights that were put into the first ten amendments to our country's constitution.

As always there are notable writers of literary fiction and other genres, among them Louis Auchincloss, Fay Weldon, and Jane Smiley along with fantasy writer Will Self and romance novelist Rosamunde Pilcher. The current United States Poet Laureate, California's Kay Ryan was also born this week.

This Week's Question: There are many parallels to the economic thoughtlessness of the Roaring Twenties that Fitzgerald described in his most well known work, The Great Gatsby, and the financial market crisis that the country is facing this week. At about the same time H.G. Wells was continuing to work on the economics of his book A Modern Utopia in which he somewhat naively assumed "whether indeed usury, that is to say the lending of money, at fixed rates of interest, will be permitted at all in Utopia, one may venture to doubt." If we are to face a new and greater Great Depression are we also likely to face a new and greater New Deal of a sustainable kind later on in the process? What political cartoon would Thomas Nast draw about all this?

Which author, alive at that same time, would not seek perfect happiness of either kind, and said this? "People need trouble— a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it. Artists do; I don't mean you need to live in a rat hole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude, endurance. Only vegetables are happy."

Answer to Last Week's Question: Humorist Robert Benchley said, "The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him. That remark in itself wouldn’t make any sense if quoted as it stands. " We may disagree, however. Try him on Wikiquote. Benchley has said a lot worth repeating. For example, the reason this post never appears on Monday anymore: "Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment. " We should call this the librarian's lament. What was that other question again?

This Week in Reading August 17 -23

This week offers a fairly recent Nobel prizewinner, V. S. Naipaul who won in 2001 while the world was feeling the effects of 9/11. Though he lives in England and calls himself a "Trinidadian" he has written mostly about the country of his ethnic roots, India and of the problems faced by Third Worlders both back home and in the First World. His works are well worth the reading because what he writes is both elegaic and universal. The other Nobel laureate is little known today and shares an unfortunate name with a classic character, the Italian poet Salvatore Quasimodo who won the Nobel in 1959.

It is also the week of H. P. Lovecraft, M. M. Kaye, and Ray Bradbury for dark, light, and sociallly speculative fantasy fans. There's Annie Proulx, Alain Robbe-Grillet for sophisticated writing, Nelson DeMille for suspense, Brian Aldiss for science fiction, with Jacqueline Susann for wild romance. We find poets Ted Hughes, Edgar Guest, and Edgar Lee Masters. Humorous light versers abound as well from Dorothy Parker and Ogden Nash from the first half of the twentieth century to Mark Russell and X. J. Kennedy in the second. And, as always, many more names and events to fill many more interests.

This Week's Question: At least two authors born this week wrote stories for the New Yorker. Who were they? Who wrote the very first 7,000 word story for that magazine?

Answer to Last Week's Question: The person known as "The Poet Laureate of Skid Row" was Los Angeles' own Charles Bukowski who has achieved cult-like status among aficionados and was immortalized in the movie, Barfly. He lived what he wrote and said once, "The difference between Art and Life is that Art is more bearable."

This Week in Reading March 2 - 8

The late but extremely popular Dr. Seuss, literary icons Tom Wolfe, Frank Norris, and Nobel Prizewinner Gabriel Garcia-Marquez were born in this week. All have certainly had respectable sales, but from now through the rest of the year, upcoming weeks will be filled with notables but few bestselling authors. You could make a case for the continued popularity of humorist Sholem Aleichem, referred to as "the Yiddish Mark Twain", and Ring Lardner whose humorous stories of innocent street types in bygone New York pleased magazine readers. Unlike Dr. Seuss, Aleichem and Lardner were known more for a specific audience, than broad commercial interest.

In addition to Dr. Seuss, the week also brings us three more illustrators of note in the cartoon spectrum. Howard Pyle drew and wrote adventures for young audiences, particulary his 1883 classic The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, which is still in print. It was a "Hollywoodized" version of a legend, made easier for mass audiences to swallow, before there even was a Hollywood. It's been said that Van Gogh was a fan. Will Eisner drew and wrote comic books and small magazines from the 1930s to the 1970s. Then he created a novel length story told through pictures--a format we now commonly refer to as a graphic novel. Ronald Searle, an English illustrator with a delightfully twisted sense of humor, gave us St. Trinian's School for Girls as well as many cartoon cats.

This week's question: Which famous playwright and illustrator worked closely as an assistant to Will Eisner during his comic book years?

Answer to last week's question: In his 1957 National Book Award speech, poet Richard Wilbur spoke of the writing of poetry as a solitary endeavor, "an unsocial way of manufacturing a thoroughly social product." He also said, "Yet of course he is pleased when recognition comes; for what better proof is there that for some people poetry is still a useful and necessary thing — like a shoe."

Theories of Everything

I just finished perusing the new collected works of cartoonist Roz Chast, called Theories of Everything. This is a brilliant collection of the cartoonist's work from 1978-2006, full of the kind of deadpan observations and self deprecating humor that has infused and informed her work for the last (almost) three decades. It's a huge coffee table style book, chock full of eccentric humor and triumphs of the mundane.

I was first exposed to Chast's cartoons in the New Yorker and I have looked forward to them in almost every issue since. The nervous, shaky style of the drawings are paired with astute and clever observations about the human condition, with much of the humor coming from quirky, awkward characters placed in recognizable, everyday situations. One of my favorites shows a person sitting at a desk, staring at a computer screen. The caption reads: The guy who took a wrong turn off the electronic superhighway and wound up in a microwave oven in Davenport, Iowa. (Man’s computer screen tells him, ‘Defrost Wingettes 4:15 PM.’)

This book tickled me. I hope you will take a look as well.