This Week in Reading May 25 - 31

"It was a dark and stormy night:"

Those seven words were only the beginning of the first line of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1830 novel, Paul Clifford; -- fifty-one words followed those seven, with parentheticals and dashes -- and, (though cartoonist Charles Schulz's Snoopy popularized those words,) they have led to the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, in which contestants write overlong, bad opening sentences like this one:

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, -- except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

Though that annual worst fiction contest is oddly not on Bulwer-Lytton's birthday, other writers born this week include some real masters of the craft. One of them, the oft quoted essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, was born on the very same day. Story writers abound with Raymond Carver, John Cheever and Jamaica Kincaid. Mystery and suspense is strong this week, too, with Dashiell Hammett, Tony Hillerman, Robert Ludlum and Ian Fleming. Also frequently recited are poets Walt Whitman and Theodore Roethke.

This Week's Question: Another author born this week is responsible for a quote that is apropos to Bulwer-Lytton as well to everyone else: "You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world." Who is it?

Answer to Last Week's Questions: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle studied medicine and joined another doctor after he graduated, then later set up a general practice on his own. However, his was not a successful practice so he spent his unoccupied hours writing stories. For a time he tried to be an opthamologist but had no patients and so wrote more and became, obviously, very successful at that instead of medicine.

(The other question was misleading only in the sense that John Barth ended up on two days of our list somehow. Actually born only on May 27th, he was this librarian's freshman English professor at the State Unversity of New York, Buffalo. The survey course he taught covered English literature chronologically, and you had to know who wrote what and when to keep up with the postmodernist, literarily reflective metafiction that Barth wrote in his off campus hours. Maybe it led eventually to this desire to keep track of writers, but did not finish school then, -- restarted and completed it and then some years later -- and never finished reading one of his books, anyway. In The Sot Weed Factor Barth is pretending to be an actual seventeenth century author but he's really satirizing that style of early picaresque fiction from today's viewpoint but ... Wait a minute, now knowing literature a bit better maybe can go back to keep up with it and finish it. Oh, all the books in a library waiting to be read! Can we get to them all?)

This Week in Reading May 18 -24

The entertainment focus continues this week but there are a few more literary names added with five -- count 'em, five! -- Nobel prizewinners to boot. We have playwrights Lorraine Hansberry, Arthur Wing Pinero, Arnold Wesker, and Marian the Librarian creator Meredith Willson, and we also have film makers Frank Capra and Richard Brooks. This week's broadcast performer who has also written novels is newsman Jim Lehrer.

Literarily we travel from Omar Khayyam to Joseph Brodsky, with Honore de Balzac, John Barth, and Robert Creeley on the way. Besides Brodsky, Mikhail Sholokov, Bertrand Russell, Sigrid Undset, and Par Lagerkvist all won the Nobel prize for Literature. Important philosopher John Stuart Mill is also in this week's list.

This Week's Question: Also born this week was the creator of the great Sherlock Holmes mystery series, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was also a physician. What kind of physician was he, and how did his success at it affect his literary career?

(Special bonus question which you're not expected to know the answer to: Which author born this week was this author's freshman English professor and did he have any influence on this librarian's love of literature?)

Answer to Last Week's Question: The author of the gothic thriller Trilby in the late 1800s was George Du Maurier, the grandfather of Dame Daphne Du Maurier, the author of Rebecca and other thrillers in the 1900s.

California Wireless Telephone Automobile Safety Act To Take Effect July 1st!

Beginning July 1st, two laws restricting the use of mobile phones and other wireless devices while driving will go into effect in California. For drivers 18 years and older, talking on a mobile phone will be prohibited without the use of a hands-free device, such as a Bluetooth (or other) headset or a speaker phone.

Drivers under the age of 18 may not use a mobile phone or other communication device (laptop, pager, etc.), with or without a hands-free device, except in the case of an emergency. Please see the California Highway Patrol’s Frequently Asked Questions page for additional information regarding fines and any exceptions (of which there are few).

According to the CHP, there will be no grace period once the law takes effect, so take the necessary steps to equip yourself with the right equipment before the July deadline. Information on hands-free phones and headsets can be found at DrivingLaws.org.

The two vehicle codes (23123 for those 18 and older, 23124 for minors) can be read in their entirety by visiting the Glendale Public Library's Online Resources page (either in the library or from any computer with Internet access). Select the Business, Statistics & Law tab to search the California Law database, then search the Vehicle Code (be sure to check the Vehicle Code box) using the code numbers above.

The full text of each bill can also be retrieved from the California State Senate's official website. SB 1613, which applies to adults, was passed during the 2005-06 session, while SB 33, which applies to minors, passed during the 2007-08 (current) session.

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.

This Saturday Is Fire Service Day in Glendale

This coming Saturday, May 10th, the Glendale Fire Department is hosting their annual Fire Service Day at Fire Station 21, located at 421 Oak Street (between Columbus and Pacific, behind the Galleria) from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. The event actually kicks off with a pancake breakfast from 9 a.m. to 12 noon. The breakfast is free, but donations will be accepted.

The event itself will feature live demonstrations, antique fire engines, emergency preparedness programs, and plenty of activities for kids, including a climbing wall, Sparky the Fire Dog, and Smokey the Bear! See the event flyer for full details.

This Week in Reading May 4 - 10

How heavy do you want your reading this week? If Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Soren Kierkegaard, and (the somewhat more accessible) philosophy of Jose Ortega y Gasset aren't dense enough for you, how about trying to get through a Thomas Pynchon novel?

For your fine literature fix the essays and reviews of Edmund Wilson or the intertextual magical realism of Angela Carter are both challenging and yet satisfying, too.

But the book for true readers to enjoy is Alan Bennett's Uncommon Reader in which Queen Elizabeth simply decides to pick up a book and soon gets carried away into reading about society and people she never knew and this in turn disturbs those around her. Funny, a bit haughty, too.

Sure, there's lighter fare for everyone, like Robin Cook and Barbara Taylor Bradford, and even Michael Palin's delightful travel writings, but it's a week for thiinking about how we live. Several political and history writers show up this week, too.

This Week's Question: Gaston Leroux's Phantom of the Opera has been adapted for stage and screen dozens, if not hundreds, of times but also may have been an adaptation itself of an earlier story by another writer. What is the source it may have come from? And what other recent work rewrote Leroux's story as a new novel with the same characters?

No answer needed to last week's question if you did find something interesting to read at the Glendale Public Library. After all, that's what we're here for. Thanks for reading.

One Glendale One Community Mural

The Glendale Central Library is proud and excited to be hosting the debut of the Unity Mural, which will be on display in the lobby for the entire month of May. The 54-foot-long mural was designed and executed entirely by a group of creative and dedicated students at Allan F. Daily High School in connection with the Glendale Sunrise Rotary Club's One Glendale One Community initiative, whose purpose is to celebrate diversity and promote unity in our fair city. For more information on the mural and its genesis, click here.

Please take the time to visit Central Library in May to see the mural in person. It's really brightening up the place! If you've seen it, please let us know what you think!

Free Comic Book Day

This Saturday, May 3rd, is Free Comic Book Day, an annual, national event celebrating the independent comic book specialty stores that need more support than ever. Our favorite local comic book store, Legacy Comics, has been kind enough to give us some free comics to give out to our patrons, so feel free to stop by Glendale Central Library's Teen Area on Saturday, May 3rd, to get your free comic book (while our supply lasts!)

While you're here, check out the Library's Graphic Novel and Manga collections. There is so much diverse and wonderful literature being published in graphic form -- from Alan Moore's gritty V for Vendetta, to Marjane Satrapi's memoir Persepolis, to Jeff Smith's children's epic Bone, and so much more -- there's really something for everyone.

Do you have a favorite graphic novel or comic book series? Does our Library carry it? Let us know!

This Week in Reading April 27 - May 3, 2008

With the Americana at Brand opening this week it's difficult to think about reading, what with all the lights, crowds, traffic, fireworks, and excitement. But, once the hoopla settles down, reading will be a major activity within the complex. Now there will be, not one, but two major bookstores within walking distance of the library.

Other than the residents who will read on their balconies and in their living rooms, a critical mass of readers, fresh from browsing public and commercial shelves, will converge daily to find spots on Americana benches to read surrounded by idealized images of an American lifestyle that perhaps never was, but might have been. It will be, however, the future of the City of Glendale in many ways.

The readers at the Glendale Public Library welcome their unique new neighbors with open doors and friendly, welcoming information and reading guidance any time it's needed. And we'll spend our lunch time browsing your stores if you'll spend yours browsing our shelves. We're sure there are many hours we can spend together in the enjoyment of each other's enriched environments. We'll be remodeling to keep up.

This Week's Question: More basic then usual, which authors were born this week and what are some of the events to read about this week?

Answer to Last Week's Question: Robert Penn Warren wrote All the King's Men, one of the all time great political novels, in which he delineated how an effective idealist--the populist poltician Willie Stark--moved toward, and then away from, virtue.

Glendale History: Before the Americana at Brand

(click on the photograph to view a larger version in a new window)

As the Americana at Brand prepares to open its doors to the public just a block west of the Glendale Central Library, it seems fitting to take a look back at the neighborhood where the Americana will reside. This photograph (courtesy of the Special Collections Room of the Glendale Public Library) shows Brand Boulevard looking north, dating from around 1936. Harvard Street, which will act as the eastern entrance into the Americana, crosses Brand Boulevard here behind the Western Auto Supply Co. sign on the left and in front of the Famous Department Store building on the right.

Other notable businesses in this image that operated in the area now covered by the Americana include a Pep Boys Auto Supplies store and the Capital Theatre. The tall building in the top center of the photograph is the Bank of America Building, which would be torn down in 1982 to make room for the Galleria II project.

The Special Collections Room in the Central Library contains thousands of photographs, news clippings, books, maps, and other materials that cover the history of Glendale, neighboring cities, and California in general. The collection is particularly useful for local history and genealogy research projects. Special Collections also houses the Cat Collection, one of the largest collections of feline-related materials in the world.

The Special Collections Room is open Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m and 1 to 3 p.m., Saturdays from 1:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m., and by appointment. Please call (818) 548-2037 for additional information.

This Week in Reading April 20 - 26

For a week with both such sad remembrance and hope for change, there are some very, very big literary names this week. We have the birthdays of Charlotte Bronte, Henry Fielding, Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Penn Warren, Bernard Malamud, and of course, William Shakespeare, whomever he, she, or they was, along with two little known (to Americans) Nobel prizewinners.

Also, there are other popular authors: fiction writer Morris West, mystery novelists Ngaio Marsh and Sue Grafton, suspense writer Alistair MacLean, and humorist mystery writer John Mortimer. It's also a thoughtful week as we have philosophers Max Weber, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as naturalist John Muir.

This Week's Question: Which author born this week said the following? "Once you start illustrating virtue as such, you'd better stop writing fiction. Do something else .. Or join a committee. Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue, but to show how a fellow may move toward it -- or away from it."

Answer to Last Week's Question: In a similar tone (to above), dictionaries, which tend to be mostly descriptive, are assumed by many to be proscriptive (or prescriptive), and, by the way, so are public libraries. Actually most dictionaries merely describe what words mean to that culture at the time of publication but meanings can change over time and place and new words get coined. The study and reporting of that word change is called etymology which is the strength of the Oxford English Dictionary. But many people assume that dictionaries prescribe what a meaning, or pronunciation ought to be, rather than what general usage has made it. Not so. The same assumption has been made about public libraries from the Victorian Era on. A public library's collection reflects the changes of interest of the society it serves and changes with it.

Hooray for National Library Week!

Pacific Park Branch Librarian, Katherine Loeser, accepted a National Library Week (NLW) proclamation from Glendale City Councilman Bob Yousefian at City Hall on Tuesday.

First sponsored in 1958, National Library Week is a national observance sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA) and libraries across the country each April. It is a time to celebrate the contributions of our nation's libraries and librarians and to promote library use and support. All types of libraries - school, public, academic and special - participate. This year's theme is Join the Circle of Knowledge @ Your Library.

Some fun NLW videos have been made capturing the humorous side of working in libraries. Here's one that captures the experience of working at the Reference Desk in "Anytown, USA."

This Week in Reading April 13 - 19

What last week lacked, this week gives back to us in spades. There are authors of very heady stuff, (including, appropriately, even an author named Braine,) and no less than three Nobel prizewinners, Anatole France, Samuel Beckett, and, recently, Seamus Heaney. Then there are strong social thinkers like George Lukacs and Emile Durkheim, avant garde poets and writers of style, and literary greats Henry James, Eudora Welty, and Thornton Wilder.

This Week's Question: It's National Library Week and we've got Thomas Jefferson, who put the Declaration of Independence into great words and whose bequest of his personal library created the Library of Congress. Also appropriately, three very important dictionaries have anniversaries of note in this week: Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language, Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language, and the later definitive opus, the Oxford English Dictionary. One of the major arguments and frequent misunderstandings about dictionaries is whether or not they are proscriptive or descriptive. The same different understandings of purpose is often applied to public libraries. What is that argument?

Answer to Last Week's Question: The writer speaking of the follies of Shakespeare commentators included himself in his remarks. He was the obscure ninetenth century Shakespearan editor and literary critic, William Hazlitt, who apparently had a sense of humor.

Are Books Obsolete?

Here's an article from Nerve.com which posits that perhaps books are bit too precious and maybe even elitist! What do you think?

This Year's Literary Pulitzer Prizes

In the week of Joseph Pulitizer's birth here are this year's winners of the Pulitizer Prize for "Letters, Drama, and Music."

Fiction

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Junot Diaz's dark and exuberant first novel makes a compelling case for the multiperspectival view of a life, wherein an individual cannot be known or understood in isolation from the history of his family and his nation.Oscar being a first-generation Dominican-American, the nation in question is really two nations. And Dominicans in this novel being explicitly of mixed Taíno, African and Spanish descent, the very ideas of nationhood and nationality are thoughtfully, subtly complicated. The various nationalities and generations are subtended by the recurring motif of fukú, the Curse and Doom of the New World, whose midwife and... victim was a historical personage Diaz will only call the Admiral, in deference to the belief that uttering his name brings bad luck (hint: he arrived in the New World in 1492 and his initials are CC). By the prologue's end, it's clear that this story of one poor guy's cursed life will also be the story of how 500 years of historical and familial bad luck shape the destiny of its fat, sad, smart, lovable and short-lived protagonist. The book's pervasive sense of doom is offset by a rich and playful prose that embodies its theme of multiple nations, cultures and languages, often shifting in a single sentence from English to Spanish, from Victorian formality to Negropolitan vernacular, from Homeric epithet to dirty bilingual insult. (Publisher Weekly.)

General Nonfiction

The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 by Saul Friedlander

In this second compelling volume of Friedländer's history of the Holocaust (see its predecessor, Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939), the author (history, Univ. of California, Los Angeles) takes into account recent scholarship on the Holocaust but avoids bogging down in the intentionalist/functionalist historiographic debate. He succeeds at integrating the analysis of the decision-making processes of Hitler and his coterie with stories of how individuals were affected by these decisions. The narrative largely conveys the voices of the victims clearly, and while Friedländer might be criticized for an overreliance on published memoirs, it is interesting to see how Victor Klemperer's story, already made famous by his published diary, is woven into the general history of the war years. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the story is the manner in which the Nazi regime relied on the consent and participation of the masses to carry out its activities. That orders for deportation and eventual extermination were being issued into the spring of 1945 demonstrates how the Nazi war against the Jews was not merely obsessive but existential. (Library Journal)

History

What Hath God Wrought: the transformation of America, 1815-1848 by Daniel Walker Howe

This authoritative addition to Oxford's "History of the United States" series is a product of synthesis and astute analysis. Intellectual and cultural historian Howe (Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln) touches upon the rapidly expanding nation's economy, foreign relations, and social structures, taking into account race, gender, and ethnicity, and bringing special insights to his discussion of religious revivals and the evolution of moral consciousness, reform movements, and political institutions. The evocative title, which was the first message carried by Morse's telegraph, refers to the changes wrought by religious sensibilities as well as those wrought by technological breakthroughs. Howe boldly emphasizes the "communications revolution" rather than the "market revolution" of the early 19th century, asserting that the latter largely happened among 18th-century commercial farmers. On the other hand, he does not emphasize a "Jacksonian America." Andrew Jackson, he asserts, was not as uniformly democratic or influential as his supporters maintain (Library Journal)

Biography

Eden's Outcasts: the story of Louisa May Alcott and her father by John Matteson

Matteson (English, John Jay Coll., CUNY) relates that "in the marvelous year of 1868, there were suddenly two best-selling authors residing under the roof of Orchard House…father and daughter achieved their most significant literary breakthroughs in the same month." In his account of Louisa May Alcott and her father, Bronson Alcott, he relies heavily on the journals, letters, and works of both authors to portray their unique lives, also quoting extensively from the writings of famous friends and neighbors like Ralph Waldo Emerson. In doing so, he allows readers to glimpse both the minds of these two literary figures and the times in which they lived. Matteson succinctly covers major events in his subjects' lives, e.g., the publication of Louisa May's novel Little Women and Bronson's attempts to establish "a saintly community of scholars in which money would be unknown." Adding another dimension to his portrayal is his concise and perceptive analysis of both Alcotts' literary works. Matteson's graceful style and careful scholarship confirm his premise that the two were indeed "Eden's outcasts… for both, life was a persistent but failed quest for perfection." (Library Journal)

Poetry

Time and Materials: poems 1997-2005 by Robert Hass

In this long-awaited volume, his first in ten years, former U.S. poet laureate Hass (Human Wishes) asks readers to consider what we have to pay for living a life in a culture that not only encompasses war and atrocities but also profound love and the tenacity for survival. Time and materials: the price to get something done, to get something fixed, something that we may have "broken." In "State of the Planet," a long poem written in a series of vignettes, he proposes that what might have been done to the planet "was something we've done quite accidentally." No matter. There is a price to pay. In poems that are sometimes elegiac, prophetic, and wise, he asks readers to consider these costs. His style is varied—from short, almost haikulike couplets to long narrative riffs, conversations (so Whitman-like) with the past, present, and future. These poems filled with modern life at the same time ponder the mythologies that create and bind our often flawed but survivable culture. Hass translates Japanese haiku poet Basho when he writes, "If the horror of the world were the truth of the world,/… there would be no one to say it/and no one to say it to." (Library Journal)

Poetry

Failure: poems by Philip Schultz

The careful, compassionate sixth outing from Schultz (Living in the Past) reverses the plot many poetry books imply. Rather than show an emotional problem (in the first poems) followed by its gradual solution, Schultz begins with warm, even heartwarming, short depictions of love, marriage, fatherhood, and mourning, in which even the elegies find reasons to love life. Schultz addresses the deceased poet David Ignatow: "I didn't go/ to your funeral, but, late at night, I/ bathe in the beautiful ashes of your words." As a reader moves through the volume, and especially in "The Wandering Wingless"- the sequence whose 58 segments and 54 pages conclude the book\-Schultz's gladness gives way to regret and grim fear. Devoted (like several of Schultz's short poems) to the virtues of dogs and of dog-ownership, and to the horrors of September 11, "Wingless" meanders through the poet's own depression and his young adult life before settling on his continuing grief for his unstable, suicidal father. "Why/ did Dad own, believe in,/ admit to, understand/ and love nothing?" It is a question no poet could answer, though Schultz sounds brave, and invites sympathy, as he tries. (Publisher Weekly)

Drama

August: Osage County by Tracy Letts

"A fraught, densely plotted saga of an Oklahoma clan in a state of near-apocalyptic meltdown, “August” is probably the most exciting new American play Broadway has seen in years. Oh, forget probably: It is, flat-out, no asterisks and without qualifications, the most exciting new American play Broadway has seen in years. Fiercely funny and bitingly sad, this turbo-charged tragicomedy — which spans three acts and more than three blissful hours — doesn’t just jump-start the fall theater season, recently stalled when the stagehands went on strike. “August” throws it instantaneously into high gear. " (New York Times Review 12/5/2007)

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."