This Week in Reading August 30 - September 5

Authors born this week -

Novelists and story writers
Theophile Gautier, Sarah Orne Jewett, Blaise Cendrars, Joseph Roth, Sally Benson, Arthur Koestler, Frank Yerby, Richard Wright, Alison Lurie, Sergei Dovlatov, Paul William Roberts

Poets and Playwrights
Playwrights: DeBose Heyward, Antonin Artaud, William Saroyan, Alan Jay Lerner, Caryl Churchill

Thinkers, Believers, Scientists, Historians, Biographers
Historians: John Gunther Biographers: Alma Mahler

Humorists, Essayists, Editors, Journalists, Officials, Media and Others
Humorists: Andrei Platonov, Bob Newhart, Molly Ivins, Lewis Black Essayists: Maria Montessori, Cleveland Amory, Raymond Williams, Elridge Cleaver, Jonathan Kozol, Jerome Corsi, Paul Miller Journalists: Daniel Schorr, Frederick Kempe, Anna Politkovskaya , Lisa Ling Media and Others: Sanford Meisner, Paul Harvey, Warren Buffett, Dr. Phil, Drew Pinsky, Kenny Mayne

Mystery / Crime / Suspense Writers
Suspense: Chris Kusneski

Fantasy / Science Fiction Writers
Fantasy: Joan Aiken, Cherry Wilder Science Fiction: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, C.J. Cherryh

Romance / Historical Fiction Writers
Historical Romance: Victoria Holt, Jean Plaidy, Historical Fiction: Phillipa Carr, Mary Renault

Adventure / Westerns
Adventure: Edgar Rice Burroughs Westerns: Forrest Carter

Visual Artists
Graphic Novelists: Walter Simonson, G. Willow Wilson Cartoonists: Mort Walker, R. Crumb, Cathy Guisewhite

Young People’s Writers
Children: Tom Glazer, Jon Berkeley

Events to read about this week:
World War Two and the Great London Fire started, and so did the City of Los Angeles, ATMs, Google, and EBay. Movies got projected and later produced. The War of Independence officially ended, and the Russian dominance in the chess world ended as well.

This Week’s Questions:
This is the first week since our current listing style began that does not boast a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. And there are no poets or philosophers this week, either. It seems disappointing, but it had to happen. There are plenty of other awards won by these folks, but none still alive would be likely to achieve Nobel status.

It is a strong genre week, however, but with no mystery writers per se. But, as we've said before, some authors can fit into several categories. William Saroyan wrote novels and stories as well as plays. And as famous as Mary Shelley is for writing Frankenstein, which itself has been put in many varied versions, she also wrote in other genres, (most of which can be found in public libraries today,) even though such a thing as "genre" of fiction didn't exist at the time. Appropriately, however, some of the other authors this week wrote in more than one style, too.

One of them wrote no less than fourteen different series (sagas, trilogies) in fiction as well as one nonfiction trilogy under various pseudonyms. Another wrote at least seventeen series of mulitple genre books, one wrote at least ten series, another wrote four series, while another wrote two series. Who are they?

Answer to Last Week’s Questions:
1 (o), 2 (q), 3 (l), 4 (p), 5 (r), 6 (k), 7 (j), 8 (c), 9 (m), 10 (n), 11 (s), 12 (t), 13 (d), 14 (e), 15 (h), 16 (g), 17 (f), 18 (i), 19 (b), 20 (a). All these films were made from original works of these authors.

This Week in Reading May 11 - 17

This week and next are full of authors whose work found expression in the entertainment sectors of their eras. This week there are playwrights like Mikhail Bulgakov, Arthur Schnitzler, Max Frisch, Paul Zindel, and both Anthony Shaffer and his twin brother Peter Shaffer.

There are film directors and producers like George Lucas, Robert Zemeckis; scriptwriters Alan Ball and Dennis Potter; and songwriters Irving Berlin and Arthur Sullivan. There are even television performers who have written novels both weeks. Late night host and comedian Craig Ferguson is this week's example. There will be another next week.

Story writers and poets this week include Katherine Anne Porter , Armistead Maupin, and Adrienne Rich. Novelists range from Alphonse Daudet to Bruce Chatwin with the Saint's Leslie Charteris for mystery ,and science fiction is represented by Stephen R. Donaldson and Roger Zelazny.

This Week's Question: Which author born this week was the grandchild of the author of one of the books mentioned in the Answer to Last Week's Question below?

Answer to Last Week's Question: There is debate about it, but Gaston Leroux's Phantom of the Opera, which was serialized first in 1909 to 1910 and adapted for stage and screen in many ways, may have been inspired by an English gothic horror novel from 1894 called Trilby in which a mad hypnotist named Svengali made an opera diva of a tone deaf woman in bohemian Paris. Susan Kay's 1991 Phantom retells Leroux's story in a literarily satisfying novel which also alludes to elements of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical version.