This Week in Reading November 23 - 29

It's Thanksgiving week. Many of us are thankful for the end of hot, dry days and the enjoyment of cool evenings where we can sit indoors in a comfortable sweater with a cup of hot chocolate or hot cider next to us while we read.

This week is also a week to catch up on some of the mistakes we've made as we approach the end of the year. While we will edit out all those old Russian calendar mistakes after the year is done, we must correct a glaring one we made two weeks ago. One of the old literary books we relied upon has shown itself wrong on several occasions and we learned that French-Romanian playwright Eugene Ionesco was born this week instead. Sorry.

With time off from work, in between family to dos, catch a little bit of classic reading with Louisa May Alcott, Laurence Sterne, C. S. Lewis, or Jin Ba. You can go literary modern with James Agee, Nancy Mitford, Arundhati Roy, or Alberto Moravia. Classic fantasists are on the menu with Madeleine L'Engle, Nelson Slade Bond, L. Sprague de Camp, and science fiction's Frederick Pohl and Poul Anderson. Top it off with the poetry and art of William Blake or the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza.

This Week's Question: One the authors born this week created illuminated books. Who was it? And what are illuminated books?

Answer to Last Week's Question: Mary Ann Evans, the woman who wrote as George Eliot, was a woman in Victorian England when women were considered to be "silly" novel writers. She had planned to publish as Marion Evans. Contemporaneous with her, however, was a famous woman who became the wife of the British Prime Minster, himself a novelist, Benjamin Disraeli, and her name was Mary Anne Evans. Somehow the name George Eliot was decided on for the novel Adam Bede which secured its author a reputation as a great writer. Because an imposter, a man, claimed to be the successful novelist, Mary Ann Evans came out as the real George Eliot and Victorian society accepted her as she published several more great novels, albeit under the male name. Besides this, Evans refused Victorian ideas of piety and in fact lived unmarried, though as married, for over twenty years to a man who could not divorce his wife, who had several children by other men in their open marriage. After he died Evans finally did marry, but to an unstable man twenty years her junior. The last years of her life which will make good screen fodder, her changing impact on the literary world for women, are depicted in the recent novel The World Before Her by Deborah Weisgall.

This Week in Reading November 16 - 22

One would imagine that this week gives us authors whose names any student of literature has heard of but whose works, except for a couple, one may not have gotten around to reading.

There are four Nobel prizewinners, France's Andre Gide (1947), Portugal's Jose Saramago (1998), South Africa's Nadine Gordimer (1991) and Sweden's Selma Lagerof (1909) who was the first woman to win it for literature. Nigerian Chinua Achebe and Canadian Margaret Atwood may yet win it, and though there was no such prize in his day, Voltaire certainly achieved that status. Other current writers with strong reputations include novelist Don deLillo and historian Shelby Foote.

Also on the list are several authors who will appeal to young adults and lovers of comics and graphic novels. There are some well known politicians, some poets, and quite a few names from television and entertainnment, as well.

Apart from the distanced works of the above literary names, two authors named George, on the other hand, have been encountered by many a high schooler. Algonquin Round Table member George S. Kauffman was the cowriter of the quintessential American comedies of the 1940s that have played on nearly every high school and amateur stage in the country and George Eliot wrote the novel, Silas Marner, which nearly every teen student has had to read for class.

This Week's Question: Once out of school, however, anyone with a taste for literature will find that the rest of the novels George Eliot wrote, Middlemarch, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, are some of the finest novels ever written. Though everyone should know that George Eliot was the pen name for a woman who wanted her books to be taken seriously in the Victorian Era in which she lived, not everyone knows a) what that real name was, b) what other famous British personality had the same name nearly at the same time, and c) that the author's highly controversial real life would have made a great novel by itself but would have needed a more enlightened era in which a movie, or at least a cable or PBS miniseries about it would find a more receptive audience.

Answer to Last Week's Question: Literary critic Roland Barthes enigmatically described literature as "the question minus the answer." Out of context, that obviously tells us nothing, but in the context of his anti-tradition structuralism, it makes some sense. That is, if you believe in another of his quotes, "the death of the author is the birth of the reader." Leading others, such as Jacques Derrida, to the theories of deconstruction, Barthes felt that there was no neutral writing and that a text is not completed until the reader "recreates" it for himself. He differentiated between writerly text which causes the reader to actively give it new and presumably personal and immediate meaning, and readerly text which allows readers to accept whatever has been stored or displayed in the text in common sense ways. While libraries are depositories and deliverers of that commonly agreed upon literature, today's new electronic media actually allow textual interactivity in ways that will show how seemingly paradoxical and nonsensical critical theories such as Barthes' will make new sense. New works by new Shakespeares will come out of new media in new ways. We can all be Shakespeares for ourselves if we play with text enough by both reading and writing.

This Week in Reading November 18 - 24

Thanksgiving is early this year on the 22nd. Next year Thanksgiving will be five days later, on the 27th, giving us less time to buy books as holiday gifts, but at least it won't seem like the holiday commercials, tree lots, and store displays are coming too early like they are this year.

This week's authors are a varied lot but you'll have to scroll down toward the later part of the list to get to the bigger names. Voltaire didn't write that much but what he put his naive Candide through in Dr. Pangloss' "best of all possible worlds" spoke volumes, nudging those who chose to become enlightened away from the powerful forces of greed and authoritarian destruction of the human spirit toward a more reasoned, egalitarian and humane future.

An English contemporary Laurence Sterne, on the other hand, gave us nine volumes of one novel but it, too, also had an innocent at its center. Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman has been both praised and reviled for being an unplotted, untidy, unending accumulation of whatever was on Sterne's mind, but most of it was fine comedy with some satire and I feel he was just centuries ahead of his time. If you read his novel like it was an Internet blog site you log onto every week or so you can enjoy the whole thing by skipping the tedious parts. I don't think he intended anything less.

The biggest name of the week is probably George Eliot, who wasn't a man, and who is often in danger of being ignored today because of having written Silas Marner which every high schooler used to be forced to read. However, Mary Anne Evans was a great writer and you haven't read Middlemarch consider taking it up. Especially if you'e grown up now. Eliot and Hardy do get better with age.

This Week's Question: A personal note, here: Harpo Speaks (co-authored by Rowland Barber) was my favorite biography of any I ever read. The only reason we didn't hear Harpo Marx in the movies was because of his Bronx accent, not because he didn't have things to say. He was as lovable as you imagine, and while not as bookish as his brother Groucho Marx, he was a more welcome friend to the writers at the Algonguin Roundtable and a real member of their "Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club." Who were some of the writers at the club and what was the other name by which it was called?

Answer to Last Week's Question: After all his other travels and at the age of forty, Robert Louis Stevenson bought 400 acres on the Samoan island of Upolu in the South Pacifc and settled in with his wife and family. He died there and was buried there just four years later. Who knows what other books he would have written.