This Week in Reading April 12 - 18

This Week's names in the library.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Novelist Anatole France (1921), Playwright, novelist Samuel Beckett (1969), Poet Seamus Heaney (1995), Novelist J. M. G. LeClezio (2007)

Obituaries

American Library Association director of the Office of Intellectual Freedom, creator of Banned Books Week, Judith Krug (1940 – 2009)

Novelists and story writers

Henry James, Richard Harding Davis, Robert Walser, Isak Dinesen, Nella Larson, Eudora Welty, Kingsley Amis, John Braine, Cynthia Ozick, Scott Turow, Nick Hornby

Poets and Playwrights
Poets: Tristan Tzara Playwrights: Edward De Vere, Thomas Middleton, John Ford, Alexandre Ostrovski, John Millington Synge, Thornton Wilder, Lanford Wilson, Alan Ayckbourn

Thinkers, Spiritualists, Scientists, Historians, Biographers
Thinkers: Emile Durkheim George Lukacs Scientists: Thomas Szasz Historians: Niall Ferguson

Humorists, Essayists, Editors, Journalists, Officials, and Others
Journalists: Margaret Adler Officials: Thomas Jefferson Others: Clarence Darrow, Charlie Chaplin, Peter Ustinov, Erich von Daniken, David Letterman, Heloise, Linda Bloodworth-Thomason

Mystery / Crime / Suspense Writers
Mystery: Delores Gordon–Smith Suspense: Jeffrey Archer

Fantasy / Science Fiction Writers
Science Fiction: Boris Strugatsky, Keith R. A. deCandido, Bruce Sterling

Visual Artists
Illustrators: Garth Williams

Young People’s Writers
Children’s Authors: Beverly Cleary Teen Authors: Benjamin Zephaniah

Events to read about

Easter, Passover, important dates in dictionaries and atlases, art, space, baseball, Da Vinci, and Chaucer. Oh, and by the way, this is National Library Week. So it’s also Fine Free Week. Get your books back and take out some more.

This Week’s Questions: There are four Nobel prizewinners this week, so here’s a literature question in the form of an awkward logic puzzle.

Of these four, three lived in France, and two were born there, but only one was solely a French citizen. Who was it?

Two were born on the Emerald Isle but not in the same country. Why not?

Which two taught college courses in the French language and wrote their main works in the French language while living in English speaking countries?

Three wrote novels, one did not. Three wrote plays, one did not. Three wrote poems, one did not. Who did not, in each category?

[In honor of Judith Krug] One wrote works banned by the Index Liborum Prohibitorum (Index of Prohibited Books) even after he won the Nobel prize. Who was it? And what is that index?

Answer to Last Week’s Questions: (1) As young literary critic William Hazlitt effusively praised and became a devoted follower and welcome sycophant of poet William Wordsworth by saying of him: "He is in this sense the most original poet now living, and the one whose writings could the least be spared: for they have no substitute elsewhere."

(2) But years later an older Hazlitt found he could not, even for social reasons, refrain from criticizing a poem Wordsworth had written and so Wordsworth then said of him in a letter to a friend, “I hope that you do not associate with the fellow; he is not a proper person to be admitted into respectable society.” So much for professional courtesy.

(3) Often called a “decadent” poet, Algernon Charles Swinburne was also a formidable literary critic, who, on a trip to France, found the poems of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal to be irresistible. His effusive words popularized the French poet in the English speaking world: "It has the languid lurid beauty of close and threatening weather--a heavy, heated temperature, with dangerous hot-house scents in it; thick shadow of cloud closed about it, and fire of molten light.”

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 9 - 15

Some strong names pop up this week. The British Isles gave us two novelists, Scotland's prolific storywriter and novelist Robert Louis Stevenson, and Ireland and England's Oliver Goldsmith, a playwright and novelist. There are two important Russians from the nineteenth century, playwright, novelist Ivan Turngenev and novelist, storywriter Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Naturalist German playwright, poet and novelist Gerhart Hauptman won one of the earliest Nobel prizes (1912) and later Romanian playwright Eugene Ionesco won awards in France where he was the leading light of the Theatre of the Absurd.

Poets Anne Sexton, Vachel Lindsay, and Marianne Moore share the week with more recent literary names which include Kurt Vonnegut and Mexico's Carlos Fuentes. Many other names, from many other genres of writing, both fiction and nonfiction, make up the rest of the week's list, some literary, some not. Or is this being too traditional?

This Week's Question: What, after all, is literature? Why do we reward those who achieve it and give short shrift to those who do not aspire to it? Yet, why do some who do not aspire to it achieve it anyway? There are other things to read besides what is traditionally called literature. Or is there not? Can just anything written to be read be called literature? A literary critic born this week says simply "Literature is the question minus the answer." Who said it? And what the heck does that mean? Is what was said clear?

Answer to Last Week's Question: "Those who write clearly have readers; those who write obscurely have commentators." was said by Albert Camus. "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." was the advice of popular novelist James Jones and perhaps that's among the reasons he was popular.

This Week in Reading July 13 - 19

There's a lot of variety this week among authors from the popular to the academic. As usual, there's a Nobel prizewinner on the list which is Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka, and one who won the Peace Prize, but is not a writer per se, Nelson Mandela. There is also poet Yeygeny Yevtushenko and philosophers Jacques Derrida and Herbert Marcuse.

There are also quite a few UK names with an influence on culture such as Thomas Bulfinch, Northrup Frye, and Kenneth Clark, along with novelists William Makepeace Thackeray, Iris Murdoch, A.J. Cronin, and contemporary Susan Howatch. Our country is represented by playwrights Clifford Odets, Arthur Laurents and Tony Kushner, along with commercial novelists, Irving Stone, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Clive Cussler.

This Week's Question: Staying with the idea of obscurity, which somewhat obscure California author born this week wrote the following: "Fiction reveals truths which reality obscures."

Answer to Last Week's Question: "Be obscure clearly" was famously written by E.B. White, the author of the children's books, Stuart Little, and Charlotte's Web, but he was also the 1959 editor of the 1918 William F. Strunk book about writing concisely, The Elements of Style, to which he added essays. The book has been referred to by writers and librarians of all kinds simply as "Strunk and White" for years.