Time now to reveal the answer to last week’s Name That Author!. But first, a recap of the clues:
1. I was often ill as a child, so spent a great deal of my time day-dreaming.
2. I wanted my stories to be like updated fairy tales, but with less violence and moralizing.
3. Though novels brought me fame, I got my start in the theatre and musicals. I probably would have enjoyed the adaptations of my most famous work, had I lived to see it.
What’s on your mind today?
In her debut novel The Year of the Gadfly, author Jennifer Miller imagines what might happen if a high-school student who communes with the ghost of Edward R. Murrow might do when faced with a story to investigate right under her nose. Miller, who holds degrees in both creative writing and journalism, wrote a post for us about some books that are the result of her two worlds “colliding” between two covers.
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At Columbia University in New York, the School of Journalism and the MFA building stand parallel to one another, but also back to back, like two stubborn friends locked in an argument. They are, in the words of the hit single by Hall and Oates, “so close, yet so far away.”
Last week my friend and fellow Book Riot writer Elizabeth Bastos asked on Twitter “Do you do lectio divina?” The phrase is Latin for “divine reading” and was originally used in conjunction with the kind of deep reading mandated for members of monastic orders. The four parts of lectio divina are reading, praying, meditating, and contemplating. Today, lectio divina can refer to careful, peaceful consumption of different types of materials, certainly no longer solely Christian and often not faith-based. People may read a daily meditation from a personal-growth program, revisit an essay that holds particular meaning, or even recite poetry with the goal of achieving a daily centering.
Mrs. Mullins had thin, curly white hair. It looked like she was growing dandelion fluff on her head. If we blew on her, she would have probably gone bald.
She was a tiny woman who taught the highest reading class when I was in sixth grade. Our reading classes were divided into highest, middle, and lowest. I think. I was always in highest reading and math. Being a budding intellectual snob, I never learned what the other classes were called.
Check out the cover for Dave Eggers’ new novel, A Hologram for the King:
A classic from Better Book Titles:
While authors in the 18th and 19th centuries are still influenced by previous centuries, authors writing in the late 20th century are instead “strongly influenced” by writers from their own decade.
I guess it is not surprising that authors from the 19th century are still influenced by previous centuries. The real news would be if they somehow weren’t any longer, since they’ve been dead for about a century.
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Great art, or, let’s just say, more modestly, original art is never created in the safe middle ground, but always at the edge. Originality is dangerous. It challenges, questions, overturns assumptions, unsettles moral codes, disrespects sacred cows or other such entities.
On a trip to Boston last week, I stumbled upon–and promptly ducked into–Commonwealth Books. Tucked in an alleyway, it is the Platonic ideal of used bookstores, and in the magical way that used-book shops have, it bestowed upon me the perfect book I didn’t know I needed: Teddy Roosevelt’s 1916 memoir, A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open. (And yes, it smells as delightful as you think a book from 1916 would smell.)
Tuesday is New Book Day. We celebrate each week by highlighting titles we’re excited to see arrive in paperback.
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1Q84 by Haruki Murakami (Vintage)
So pretty!
The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo. A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver’s enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84-”Q is for ‘question mark.’ A world that bears a question.” Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspect ghostwriting project. He becomes so wrapped up with the work and its unusual author that, soon, his previously placid life begins to come unraveled. As Aomame’s and Tengo’s narratives converge over the course of this single year, we learn of the profound and tangled connections that bind them ever closer.
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