This Week in Reading December 14 - 20

We have an alphabet of well known events and people to read about this week. We’ve got Antarctica, George Bailey, basketball, Beethoven, the Bill of Rights, the Boston Tea Party, and Charles Dickens' “A Christmas Carol.” And that’s only the a-b-c’s. There’s also flight, football, Franklin's "Poor Richard," Marian the Librarian, Nostradamus, and poets laureate.

Authors fall into the a-b-c’s as well, with some extra alliteration going on in their names. We begin with Edwin Abbott Abbott (Really. He wrote “Flatland.” What else, with a name like that?) Then there’s Maxwell Anderson, Jane Austen, Abe Burrows, Erksine Caldwell, Hortense Calisher, Sandra Cisneros, Arthur C. Clarke, Noel Coward, Philip K. Dick, (and you see where this is going,) on to Ford Madox Ford, Margaret Mead, Michael Moorcock, H. H. Munro, (known as “Saki,”) Steven Spielberg, and all the way to poet John Greenleaf Whittier, with no Nobel prizewinner among them, for once. But, of course, there are many other fine authors, as always.

This Week’s Question: There are some unspoken themes this week. Among them, several of the authors born this week had war and antiwar connections. One was fired from teaching for supporting a student conscientious objector, another was a Quaker. And while a few also served in the military, one was actually a spy and one was killed on the battlefield. Who are they?

Also, while several authors this week won Pulitzer prizes, one author won one for a book he didn’t even get published. Who’s that?

Answer to Last Week’s Question: “Every fine story must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure, a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer’s own, individual, unique.” – Willa Cather

“You don’t know what it is to stay the whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word … Ah! I certainly know the agonies of style.” -- Gustave Flaubert

This Week in Reading September 16 - 22

Authors born this week include names whose work you were probably assigned to read in school, William Golding, Upton Sinclair, Francis Parkman, Samuel Johnson, and poet William Carlos Williams. But it also gives us names of the authors we'd read without anyone asking us to, masters of imagination and suspense like H.G. Wells and Stephen King.

It's also a good week to read about civil rights because the United States Constitution was signed on September 17, 1787. In January the library will host a presentation and series of sessions with Dave Kluge, the author of The People's Guide to the United States Constitution, which is being published on Constitution Day this week. (Watch this space for more details as they become available.) Also think about those who have been prevented from enjoying such rights until declared free and about other countries whose people later became free and independent.

This Week's Question: While thinking about civil rights, when is Banned Books Week going to be celebrated at this library and in bookstores?

Answer to Last Week's Question: In "James Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" Mark Twain responded to critics in nineteenth century America and England who had called James Fenimore Cooper an artist based on their seemingly numerical assessments of his work. Tongue thoroughly in cheek, he says "Cooper's art has some defects. In one place in 'The Deerslayer', and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record."

Among these offenses: "That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere"; "that the personages in a tale, being both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there"; "the author shall ... use the right word, not its second cousin"; "eschew surplusage"; and "use good grammar." He goes to list other offenses and ends with "Counting these out, what's left is Art. I think we must all admit that."

Today's critics, however, have begun to look anew at Cooper's work and, as much as I agree with Twain, they say he was satirizing the pedestrian styles of literary criticism at the time, not the author per se. Some are re-assessing Cooper's importance to American literature. Coming soon to both libraries is Wayne Franklin's James Fenimore Cooper: the early years, the first of two such planned volumes.