This Week in Reading February 22 - 28

Literary Names of Note This Week

Nobel Prize in Literature: John Steinbeck (1962)

Novelists and story writers: Victor Hugo, Frank G. Slaughter, James T. Farrell, Marcel Pagnol, Irwin Shaw, Lawrence Durrell, Anthony Burgess, Peter De Vries, N. Scott Momaday, Dee Brown Sean O’Faolain

Poets and Playwrights: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Stephen Spender, Howard Nemerov, Ishmael Reed, Carlo Goldoni, Ben Hecht, Larry Gelbart

Thinkers, Spiritualists, Scientists, Historians: Arthur Schoepenhaur, Karl Jaspers, Bendetto Croce, Rudolf Steiner.W. E. B. Du Bois, William L. Shirer, Paul Krugman

Humorists, Essayists, Editors, Journalists, Biographers: Michel de Montaigne, Samuel Pepys

Mystery / Crime / Suspense Writers: Elizabeth George, John Sandford, Tim Powers

Fantasy / Science Fiction Writers: Willhelm Grimm, August Derleth, Theodore Sturgeon

Historical Fiction Writers: Bernard Cornwell

Graphic Novelists / Cartoonists / Illustrators: Edward Gorey, Milton Caniff

Children’s / Teen Authors: Lemony Snicket

Events to read about: Fascists, Nazis, Communists, Republicans, witches, clones, six shooters, Grand Canyon and Guantanamo Bay, along with the Supreme Court twice, a president, an artist, an architect and two very important printers, Gutenberg, who brought printed books to the Western world, and typographer Daniel Berkeley Updike.

This Week’s Questions: “I quote others only the better to express myself.” “And because I found I had nothing else to write about, I presented myself as a subject.” Was this said by a blogger or one of this week’s authors?

Who are the three authors born this week who gave the following advice to would-be authors?

“Write freely and rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on.”

“Keep going. Writing is finally play and there is no reason you should get paid for playing. If you’re a real writer, you’ll write no matter what.”

"It comes down to what I call "suit up and show up." ... A lot of writing is simply showing up and doing the work day after day."

Answer to Last Week’s Question: One of the writers above said “Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one single person – a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.”

Along the same lines, Toni Morrison, who is also the author of last week's quotes, said this: “Whenever I feel uneasy about my writing, I think: What would be the response of the people in the book if they read the book? That’s my way for staying on track. Those are the people for whom I write.”

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.