This Week in Reading July 26 - August 1

Authors born this week -

Nobel Prize in Literature
Poet Giosue Carducci (1906), playwright, novelist George Bernard Shaw (1925), novelist Eyvind Johnson (1974)

Novelists and story writers
Richard Henry Dana, Jr, Emily Bronte, Herman Melville, Alexandre Dumas fils, Vladimir Korolenko, Booth Tarkington, Aldous Huxley, Paul Gallico, Joseph Mitchell, Malcolm Lowry, Primo Levi, Elizabeth Hardwick, Edwin O’Connor, Ana Maria Matute, Cees Nooteboom, Patrick Modiano, Harry Mulisch, Chang-rae Lee

Poets and Playwrights
Poets: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Antonio Machado, Stanley Kunitz, Anne Hebert, John Ashbery, Michael Longely, Jim Carroll Playwrights: Dean Pitchford

Thinkers, Believers, Scientists, Historians, Biographers
Thinkers: Thorstein Veblen, Jean Baudrillard, Pierre Bourdieu, John Searle Believers: Helena Blavatsky Scientists: Carl Jung Historians: C. Northcote Parkinson, Ken Burns Biographers: Andre Maurois, Rick Bragg

Humorists, Essayists, Editors, Journalists, Officials, Media and Others
Humorists: Don Marquis, Jean Shepherd, Carol Leifer Essayists: Alexis de Tocqueville, Milton Friedman, Vincent Canby, William J. Bennett, Richard Roeper Journalists: Howard Kurtz Officials: Pat Schroeder Media and others: Melvin Belli, Peter Jennings, Anita Hill, Alton Brown

Mystery / Crime / Suspense Writers
Mystery: Brett Halliday Suspense: Jack Higgins

Fantasy / Science Fiction Writers
Fantasy: Cherie Priest Science Fiction: Steve Miller

Visual Artists
Cartoonists: Jim Davis

Young People’s Writers
Children’s: Beatrix Potter, Hillaire Belloc, Ernst Jandl, Lynn Reid-Banks, Jan Berenstain, J. K. Rowling Teens: Cat Bauer, James St. James

Events to read about this week:
What's the shortest way with dissenters? Which was worse, the way Daniel Defoe was treated centuries ago, or the way US veterans were treated in the last century? The movies gave us cartoons, a film director, music videos, and a governor. There are two Henrys, two unionists, a Yankee and a flag wagging composer, a killer and a life saver.

Obituaries

Novelist E. Lynn Harris, 54

This Week’s Questions:

How's your summer reading going? Remember that the Adult Summer Reading Program goes on through September 8. Are you dropping off your brief reviews at a library reference desk for the weekly drawings and grand prize drawing?

"In literature, as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others." The first modern paperback book was published this week in 1935. Which author, born this week, wrote it, and said that quote? What was the title and who published it?

Answer to Last Week’s Questions:
"It’s hard enough writing books without having to explain them." – Ernest Hemingway

"In the long run, however little you talk or even think about it, the most durable thing in writing is style ..." Raymond Chandler

"Clear prose indicates the absence of thought." – Marshall McLuhan

"In everything that be called art, there is a quality of redemption. There may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid." – Raymond Chandler

"I get this crazy feeling. Every once in a while I get it. I get the feeling that this is the last time in history when the offbeats like me will have a chance to live free in the nooks and crannies of the huge and rigid structure of an increasingly codified society. Fifty years from now I would be hunted down in the street. They would drill little holes in my skull and make me sensible and reliable and adjusted." – John D. MacDonald

"She walked into my office on legs as long as one of those long-legged birds that you see in Florida - the pink ones, not the white ones - except that she was standing on both of them, not just one of them, like those birds, the pink ones, and she wasn't wearing pink, but I knew right away that she was trouble, which those birds usually aren't." - Eric Rice, 2009 winner in the Detective category of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest (Compared to Chandler's more prosaic line from Farewell, My Lovely: "It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick out a hole in a stained glass window."

Read any bad book openings lately?

The 2008 Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest has announced its winners, and as promised here it is. The contest, run by a professor at San Jose State's English and Comparative Literature Department, is in the spirit of the nineteenth century novelist Edward Bulwer Lytton who is best known for his famous first line that begins "It was a dark and stormy night ..." The professor seeks to find the worst opening sentences to novels of many genres.

This is year's overall winner: Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped "Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J."

There are dozens of other gems, in nearly every genre, with good puns and vile, and some defying description. For a good read of some very funny bad reads go to the Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest website. Compare them with the books you're reading now. Click on "comments" and tell us if you see anything as bad opening a book you've checked out from the library.