This Week in Reading April 26 - May 2

Authors born this week:

Nobel Prize Winners
Poet Vicente Aleixandre (1977)

Novelists and Story Writers

Jose de Alencar, Rafael Sabatini, Jaroslav Hasek, Antal Szerb, Morris West, Harper Lee, Joseph Heller, Bernard Malamud, Terry Southern, Annie Dillard, John Boyne

Poets and Playwrights
Poets: Roberto Bolano, Rod McKuen Playwrights: Jerome K. Jerome, Clyde Fitch, Anita Loos, August Wilson

Thinkers, Believers, Scientists, Historians, Biographers
Thinkers: David Hume, Herbert Spencer, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Ludwig Wittgenstein Scientists: Benjamin Spock Historians: Edward Gibbon, Aviva Chomsky

Humorists, Essayists, Editors, Journalists, Officials, and Others
Humorists: John Arbuthnot Essayists: Joseph Addison, Mary Wollstonecraft, Coretta Scott King Journalists: Karl Kraus, Hedda Hopper, Maury Allen, Rowland Evans Officials: Marcus Aurelius Media and others: Alice B. Toklas, Lorenz Hart, Jack Paar, Alice Waters, Jay Leno, Larry Elder, Jerry Seinfeld

Mystery / Crime / Suspense Writers
Mystery: Jill Paton Walsh, Ian Rankin Suspense: Alistair MacLean

Fantasy / Science Fiction Writers
Fantasy: Terry Pratchett, Joel Rosenburg Science Fiction: E. E. Smith, Jack Williamson, A. E. van Vogt, Larry Niven, Robert J. Sawyer

Visual Artists
Illustrators: John James Audubon

Young People’s Writers
Teen Authors: Lois Duncan


Events to read about, as always.

This Week’s Questions:

Science fiction is strongly represented this week. In fact, there is someone known as the "Dean of Science Fiction." There is also the "Father of Space Operas." Another created some "Laws of Science Fiction." More than one credit libraries for inspiring their imaginations. Who are they?

Answer to Last Week’s Questions:

Most Shakespeare companies and festivals perform on stages named after donors or founders. Two were named the Globe, such as the Old Globe in San Diego and the newly built London replica called Shakespeare's Globe Theatre on the site of the original. Although there may be smaller ones somewhere, the only prominent performance stage named the Royal Shakespeare Theatre are the ones used by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-Upon-Avon, England. It is currently closed for reconstruction until next year and performances are in the Courtyard Theatre and at other stages in London and Newcastle.

Classic mystery novelist Ngaio Marsh, known as one of the four "Queens of Crime" of the Golden Age of English detective novels, wrote over thirty mysteries set around the stage in the first half of the twentieth century. Marsh was a theatrical director herself in New Zealand. The University of Canterbury, in Christchurch, named the Ngaio Marsh Theatre to honor her endeavors there. Marsh's novels were set in England, primarily in London's West End. Marsh's genttlemanly detective, Roderick Alleyn, was not an actor (like Simon Brett's amateur detective Charles Paris) but he loved theatre and the actresses he met there.

This Week in Reading April 20 - 26

For a week with both such sad remembrance and hope for change, there are some very, very big literary names this week. We have the birthdays of Charlotte Bronte, Henry Fielding, Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Penn Warren, Bernard Malamud, and of course, William Shakespeare, whomever he, she, or they was, along with two little known (to Americans) Nobel prizewinners.

Also, there are other popular authors: fiction writer Morris West, mystery novelists Ngaio Marsh and Sue Grafton, suspense writer Alistair MacLean, and humorist mystery writer John Mortimer. It's also a thoughtful week as we have philosophers Max Weber, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as naturalist John Muir.

This Week's Question: Which author born this week said the following? "Once you start illustrating virtue as such, you'd better stop writing fiction. Do something else .. Or join a committee. Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue, but to show how a fellow may move toward it -- or away from it."

Answer to Last Week's Question: In a similar tone (to above), dictionaries, which tend to be mostly descriptive, are assumed by many to be proscriptive (or prescriptive), and, by the way, so are public libraries. Actually most dictionaries merely describe what words mean to that culture at the time of publication but meanings can change over time and place and new words get coined. The study and reporting of that word change is called etymology which is the strength of the Oxford English Dictionary. But many people assume that dictionaries prescribe what a meaning, or pronunciation ought to be, rather than what general usage has made it. Not so. The same assumption has been made about public libraries from the Victorian Era on. A public library's collection reflects the changes of interest of the society it serves and changes with it.

This Week in Reading April 13 - 19

What last week lacked, this week gives back to us in spades. There are authors of very heady stuff, (including, appropriately, even an author named Braine,) and no less than three Nobel prizewinners, Anatole France, Samuel Beckett, and, recently, Seamus Heaney. Then there are strong social thinkers like George Lukacs and Emile Durkheim, avant garde poets and writers of style, and literary greats Henry James, Eudora Welty, and Thornton Wilder.

This Week's Question: It's National Library Week and we've got Thomas Jefferson, who put the Declaration of Independence into great words and whose bequest of his personal library created the Library of Congress. Also appropriately, three very important dictionaries have anniversaries of note in this week: Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language, Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language, and the later definitive opus, the Oxford English Dictionary. One of the major arguments and frequent misunderstandings about dictionaries is whether or not they are proscriptive or descriptive. The same different understandings of purpose is often applied to public libraries. What is that argument?

Answer to Last Week's Question: The writer speaking of the follies of Shakespeare commentators included himself in his remarks. He was the obscure ninetenth century Shakespearan editor and literary critic, William Hazlitt, who apparently had a sense of humor.

This Week in Reading - March 16 - 22

This week gives us some modern writers of note, John Updike, and Phillip Roth, as well as the first modern dramatist, Henrik Ibsen. But the Roman poet Ovid is worth remembering for his Metamorphosis, especially as it is related to both mythology and the history of Shakespeare, which ultimately gave rise to last week's question and which takes most of this space to answer.

This week's question: Have you filled out the survey about using the library, either in person or online, that is on the library home page? Please do.

Answer to last week's question: What are 'ides'? Ask a simple question; get a complicated answer: "Beware the Ides of March" is spoken by a soothsayer to the title character in Shakespeare's tragedy, Julius Caesar, in the second scene of the first act. It will be the day on which Caesar is assassinated by senators claiming that they do it to keep Rome a republic rather than the monarchy that Caesar's continued existence would make it. The 'ides of March' referred to March 15 specifically as a single day and it sounds to modern ears as if it should be several days, but the word is not plural.

In Latin it was 'idus' and the Elizabethans probably pronounced it with two syllables when the English spelling became "ides'. It was likely derived from the Latin word 'ides,' 'to divide,' and that is, in fact, how the month was divided in Latin parlance - from and after the fifteenth day, (in March, May, July, and October, while it was the thirteenth in the others.) There were also 'nones' in addition to ides. They were the day in each month which was nine (see the similarity?) days before the ides. (But unlike the way we count, the day you started from got counted in Rome, so the nones was usually the fifth or seventh day of the month for them, while we would think they'd be the fourth or sixth day.)

The ides was also, in the Roman calendar, the peak of the full moon, as that was easy enough for them to see by the size of the moon or lack of it. The 'calends' (hence the word 'calendar',) was the thirteenth or fifteenth day before the ides, or, as we know it, is the first day of a month. Also thirteen or fifteen days after the ides would be the darkest of the moon and then, they'd start over and count toward the 13th or 15th day of the next month. There were two calends in leap years, on February 24 and 25, to try to keep up with the cycles of the moon and sun.

Confused, yet? The Roman calendar really did things differently than you would expect a calendar to do. For one thing they didn't number the years like we do, they named each one instead. Imagine remembering the names of all the years you've been alive -- you were born in the year of "what's his name" and started your education in "the year of the emperor's wife" -- and imagine your parents telling you stories of what happened back then in the year of old so and so. (But this is probably why legal and religious forms still say, by tradition, ".. in the year of our ..")

Lastly, they had only ten months with eight days in each week; until two months were added to honor Julius Caesar (July) and Emperor Augustus (August). But they put the two new months in the middle instead of adding them to the end. This is why our tenth month is called October (octo = eighth), our eleventh is November (nove = ninth) and our twelfth is December (deca = tenth.) And, on top of that, there were twelve hours in each day and in each night so the duration of each hour varied throughout the year according to how long one-twelfth of a day or night would be in that segment of a year. Without a watch to wear you looked at the sky and moon, but it changed everyday.

Now stop complaining about having to change your clocks only twice a year. We've got it easy!

This Week in Reading February 3 - 9

As indicated before it's bestselling authors on parade this week. Within this span of a few days in February we have the birth dates of popular and prolific authors Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Sinclair Lewis, James Michener, John Grisham, Alice Walker and Andrew Greeley all of whom who have sold books in the millions to readers and to public libraries like this one.

Besides those very popular fiction writers there are also literary names well known to more serious readers, such as playwrights Christopher Marlowe, Brendan Behan, poet Amy Lowell, and countercultural heroes Gertrude Stein and William S. Burroughs, most of whom have sold millions of copies to college libraries and their students after their deaths.

This Week's Question: Christopher Marlowe, perhaps born this week, (no one really knows,) was killed at the age of twenty-nine in May of 1593, according to official transcripts, possibly as a result of his underworld spying activities. Before that time he had written the plays Doctor Faustus, Tamburlaine (parts 1 and 2), The Jew of Malta, Edward II, and his first, at the age of twenty-three, a collaboration called Dido, Queen of Carthage. Because of his poetical and dramatic skills there is little doubt in many literary historians' views that had he lived he would have been not just a contemporary but an equal to William Shakespeare. However, there has been ongoing controversy among only a very few that he, among other candidates, was, in fact, the man who wrote the plays attributed to a front man known as 'Shakespeare'. While recognizing that no one has ever proved, nor likely can, that Marlowe, nor any of the others, was Shakespeare, a few base facts are nonetheless tantalizing. Marlowe was born in 1564. When was Shakespeare born? And at what age did Shakespeare begin his playwriting career?

Answer to Last Week's Question: The Library of Congress was begun anew after its 1814 burning by the acquistion of 6,487 books from the personal collection of Thomas Jefferson.