This Week in Reading June 15 - 21

Summer comes in officially at the end of this week. While you might expect mystery, suspense, and light fiction for such weather, they are mostly missing from the authors born this week. (Except for Erich Segal, whose Love Story was a big 1970s beach read, and Rosamond Smith, who is the pseudonym of one of the more serious literary authors born this week.)

What we're left with, however, are some very complex, thoughtful, and highly literary authors of the likes of Joyce Carol Oates, Salman Rushdie, John Hersey, Laura Z. Hobson, Charles Chesnutt, Vikram Seth, Mary McCathy, Lillian Hellman, and Ian McEwan. Every one of them writes about love, several about music and love, and all about difficult human relations between individuals and groups. There's many a beach read here, but they're not light.

This Week's Question: "If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble," was said by an author born this week. One of his characters, whose companion was in the process of reading all the books in the library in alphabetic order, also said, "All that I know about my life, it seems, I learned in books." Who was the author, and what, by the way, is that book that has a very specific relationship to the major novel of another author born this week?

Answer to Last Week's Question: Next to the engraving of Shakespeare in the First Folio of his plays in 1623, playwright Ben Jonson appended this poem:

To the Reader

This Figure, that thou here seest put,
It was for gentle Shakespeare cut,
Wherein the Graver had a strife
with Nature, to out-doo the life:

O, could he but have drawne his wit

As well in brasse, as he hath hit

His face ; the Print would then surpasse

All, that was ever writ in brasse.

But, since he cannot, Reader, looke

Not on his Picture, but his Booke.

Though Jonson's other poem in the folio praises Shakespeare's skill over rivals, specifically Marlowe, these short lines, especially the last one, give some non-Stratfordians cause to suggest that the picture of the man is not a picture of the author of the plays in the books. We'll never know, of course.

This Week in Reading April 6 - 12

What do you say for a week that begins with the birth of the Twinkie (tm) and ends up on the birthday of David Letterman? Oh, sure, there's a Nobel prizewinner in it, Gabriela Mistral, who was the first Latin American woman to win that prize, and some fine literary writers, Donald Barthelme and Paul Theroux, for example. But other than Joseph Pulitizer, whose bequest gives the prize of that name to many winners too numerous to keep track of here, (twenty some a year - see who's announced all throughout the week,) there is not a lot of literary depth in reading this week.

Of course, if you like creative science fiction, thrilling fiction, and great muckraking journalism, you're good to go. You'll juist have to look at this week's list to see who these fine writers are.

Answer to Last Week's Question: Okay, if you don't have a favorite poem to share, how about one in your pocket each day? Go to the Academy of American Poets and find out about Poem in Your Pocket. The big day is Thursday, April 17. Get your poem here. We've got lots, at all the branches.

This Week's Question: There are playwrights and poets, too, this week. One of them may or may not have been both, (as we have dealt with before in this space), but can you guess which author this week said the following? "To know the force of human genius we should read Shakespeare; to see the insignificance of human learning we may study his commentators."

This Week in Reading February 3 - 9

As indicated before it's bestselling authors on parade this week. Within this span of a few days in February we have the birth dates of popular and prolific authors Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Sinclair Lewis, James Michener, John Grisham, Alice Walker and Andrew Greeley all of whom who have sold books in the millions to readers and to public libraries like this one.

Besides those very popular fiction writers there are also literary names well known to more serious readers, such as playwrights Christopher Marlowe, Brendan Behan, poet Amy Lowell, and countercultural heroes Gertrude Stein and William S. Burroughs, most of whom have sold millions of copies to college libraries and their students after their deaths.

This Week's Question: Christopher Marlowe, perhaps born this week, (no one really knows,) was killed at the age of twenty-nine in May of 1593, according to official transcripts, possibly as a result of his underworld spying activities. Before that time he had written the plays Doctor Faustus, Tamburlaine (parts 1 and 2), The Jew of Malta, Edward II, and his first, at the age of twenty-three, a collaboration called Dido, Queen of Carthage. Because of his poetical and dramatic skills there is little doubt in many literary historians' views that had he lived he would have been not just a contemporary but an equal to William Shakespeare. However, there has been ongoing controversy among only a very few that he, among other candidates, was, in fact, the man who wrote the plays attributed to a front man known as 'Shakespeare'. While recognizing that no one has ever proved, nor likely can, that Marlowe, nor any of the others, was Shakespeare, a few base facts are nonetheless tantalizing. Marlowe was born in 1564. When was Shakespeare born? And at what age did Shakespeare begin his playwriting career?

Answer to Last Week's Question: The Library of Congress was begun anew after its 1814 burning by the acquistion of 6,487 books from the personal collection of Thomas Jefferson.

This Week in Reading June 17 - 23

The youngest author born this week surely sold more copies than any other writer born this week and the next youngest after that one put out works that sold in the millions, too. But several of the other authors who share the week had a much larger impact upon the world beyond reading, from theatre, film, and popular music to philosophy, religion and sociological research that affected many millions. Some the events affected many millions, too.

This Week's Question: One of this week's authors would have been a voluminous blogger of his day if the Internet had existed. He opined among his countless quotes "One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man." Who is it and what "message" is he associated with?

Answer to Last Week's Question: Sorry, this trick question tricked even me. None of last week's authors said it. I thought it was argued that Ben Jonson actually wrote it but it was penned by the little known Robert Greene, who wrote in 1592 "For there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with a tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as is the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes fac totum is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country." Jonson, on the other hand, eulogized Shakepeare with "He was not of an age but for all time." I used Bartlett's Familiar Quotations to find these out.