This Week in Reading January 1 - 7

Literary authors born this week:

Initially: E. M. Forster, J. R. R. Tolkien, J. D. Salinger, E. L. Doctorow; also Isaac Asimov, Zora Neale Hurston, and Umberto Eco.

Poets and Playwrights: Carl Sandburg and Christopher Durang.

Nobel prizewinners: Rudolf Eucken (1908) and Gao Xingjian. (2000).

Thinkers, doers, and other well known authors: Cicero, Isaac Newton, Jacob Grimm, Heinrich Schliemann, Kahlil Gibran, Alan Watts, Charles Addams, B. Kliban, James Frazer, Gerald Durrell, Doris Kearns Goodwin

Answer to Last Week’s Question: J. D. Salinger wrote several books and stories with characters from the Glass family, Franny and Zooey, and Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenters and Seymour among them.

This Week’s Question: When you’re too rushed on the way out of town to research anything, sometimes the opposite of literature happens. Why are all these authors with initials born in the same week? (There is no reasonable answer but we'd love to hear it if you have one. Don't forget B. Kliban, the cartoonist.) See you next week.

This Week in Reading November 2 - 8

Just so you know, there will be much to read in the future about this week in history because of the monumental event that has happened to America .There are two Nobel prizewinning authors this week: Albert Camus, the existentialist French novelist and poet Odysseus Elytis from Greece. Essayist Andre Malraux and historian Will Durant are known names. Besides those, it's novelists galore again with Margaret Mitchell and James Jones leading the pack of lesser knowns. Along with them -- born on a day which is often apropriately enough Election Day -- are the famous humorist Will Rogers and equally revered, but still living to see what happened this week, newscaster Walter Cronkite.

This Week's Question: Which of this week's authors said the following? "Those who write clearly have readers; those who write obscurely have commentators." Which one said this? "... I don't think it ever hurts the writer to sort of stand back now and then and look at his stuff as if he were reading it instead of writing it."

Answer to Last Week's Question: Napoleon Hill was a young reporter who was given the assignment to interview some successful men. Among the first he encountered was Andrew Carnegie who liked the concept so much he gave Hill letters of Introduction to the most successful people of the day. Hill spent years then learning and then distilling what he called the "Philosophy of Achievement" and later with Carnegie published home study courses called "The Law of Success." As part of that path he edited his own magazine entitled Hill's Golden Rule.

Emily Post was born into money and attended finishing school. After marriage difficulties she needed to write to support herself and turned to magazine article and story writing. After a while she wrote travel books with humor in them, and several novels (none of which the library has, sad to say.) Her ettiquette books, through she became the country's leading authority, grew out of a column she had written about the topic.

This Week in Reading October 12 -18

Playwrights and philosophers highllight this week's strong authors. Starting with Alice Childress early in the week, Oscar Wilde and Eugene O'Neill were both born on the 16th, Arthur Miller on the 17th, and the 18th gives us Heinrich von Kleist, Sidney Kinglsley, and Wendy Wasserstein. Heavy thinkers include Henri Bergson, Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Michael Foucault, while social thinkers include John Kenneth Galbraith, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr, C. P. Snow and John W. Dean.

Bergson, O'Neill, and Gunter Grass won Nobel prizes in Literature. Other literary names of note on the list this week are the classical poet Virgil who always wrote in caps (because all literate Romans did), the modern poet e. e. cummings who didn't use any, and the short story master Italo Calvino.

Mario Puzo, Conrad Richter, P. G. Wodehouse, Ed McBain, Shel Silverstein, and Terry McMillan are very popular authors but none sold more volumes than Noah Webster, the dictionary maker.

This Week's Question: We all know Oscar Wilde is one of the most often quoted authors, and his witty aphorisms fill many pages. For example, "The good end happily, the bad unhappily -- that's what fiction means." and "All morning I worked on the proof of one of my poems, and I took out a comma; in the afternoon I put it back." One of the other writers born this week, however, probably had to work that way in the later years of life, so encumbered by a disease that it forced small movements of the hand such that only very tiny words could be written using the points of many pencils. Who created some of literature's most compelling, but most microscopic works this way?

Answer to Last Week's Question: As seen here, the 2008 Nobel Prize for literature went to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, an author of intercultural sensitivity with strong critical approval. We expect to see more of his works gaining American interest as this country now moves toward greater acceptance and understanding of world culture differences and similarities.