This Week in Reading August 17 -23

This week offers a fairly recent Nobel prizewinner, V. S. Naipaul who won in 2001 while the world was feeling the effects of 9/11. Though he lives in England and calls himself a "Trinidadian" he has written mostly about the country of his ethnic roots, India and of the problems faced by Third Worlders both back home and in the First World. His works are well worth the reading because what he writes is both elegaic and universal. The other Nobel laureate is little known today and shares an unfortunate name with a classic character, the Italian poet Salvatore Quasimodo who won the Nobel in 1959.

It is also the week of H. P. Lovecraft, M. M. Kaye, and Ray Bradbury for dark, light, and sociallly speculative fantasy fans. There's Annie Proulx, Alain Robbe-Grillet for sophisticated writing, Nelson DeMille for suspense, Brian Aldiss for science fiction, with Jacqueline Susann for wild romance. We find poets Ted Hughes, Edgar Guest, and Edgar Lee Masters. Humorous light versers abound as well from Dorothy Parker and Ogden Nash from the first half of the twentieth century to Mark Russell and X. J. Kennedy in the second. And, as always, many more names and events to fill many more interests.

This Week's Question: At least two authors born this week wrote stories for the New Yorker. Who were they? Who wrote the very first 7,000 word story for that magazine?

Answer to Last Week's Question: The person known as "The Poet Laureate of Skid Row" was Los Angeles' own Charles Bukowski who has achieved cult-like status among aficionados and was immortalized in the movie, Barfly. He lived what he wrote and said once, "The difference between Art and Life is that Art is more bearable."

This Week in Reading June 22 - 28

Officially Summer now, this week's list of authors begins and ends with adventure and suspense as it probably should. H. Rider Haggard's novels and stories of colonialist adventurers have been made into countless movies. Eric Ambler was one of the most widely read suspense writers of his era, and the success of his amateur-who-gets-caught-up-with-spys novels brought him to live in Los Angeles as a successful screenwriter.

Two more highly successful suspense novelists were born this week. Lawrence Block has written dozens of mystery novels in at least five series. Dan Brown's Angels and Demons is currently about to be filmed as a follow up to his blockbuster DaVinci Code.

Pearl S. Buck wrote family sagas based on her Chinese missionary childhood that were so good she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature. And let us not forget, (though we did at first), that this week gives us George Orwell, as well.

This Week's Question: What other author born this week won the Nobel Prize in literature?

Answer to Last Week's Question: Jean Paul Sartre won the Nobel prize in Literature but turned it down. His questions in existential philosophy underlie his most famous novel Nausea. That "sweet sickness" happens to his protagonist who grows to despise his (and every one else's) physical existence but learns that he must live with it, including the Self Taught Man who was reading every book in the library in alphabetical order. Often related to the problem encountering Hamlet, both this book and Oblamov, written many years earlier in Russia by Ivan Goncharov, find their characters faced with "to be or not to be." Oblamov eventually answered no, but Sartre's Antoine, has to say yes.