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A Writer's Wit: Beverly Cleary

4/12/2022

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My mother always kept library books in the house, and one rainy Sunday afternoon—this was before television, and we didn't even have a radio—I picked up a book to look at the pictures and discovered I was reading and enjoying what I read.
​Beverly Cleary
Author of over 40 books, including Ramona the Brave
Born April 12, 1916
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B. Cleary
FRIDAY: My Book World | Henry James's The American
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Freya: An Independent Woman

4/8/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
The artist who really creates something creates it forever, but the scholar is at the mercy of expanding knowledge and changing habits of thought.
​C. M. Bowra
Author of The Romantic Imagination
​Born April 8, 1898
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C. M. Bowra

My Book World

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Quinn, Anthony. Freya. New York: Europa, 2017.

This novel, full of twists and turns, could perhaps, only have been written by a Brit—someone trained in reading and writing wordsmithing-worthy work. The plotting is superb. Characterization sparkling. Quinn gives readers the proper clues, subtle though they may be, and astute readers store them away and can say (or not), I knew it. I knew it was him. Two young women, the titular Freya and Nancy, meet at Oxford during WWII and develop a lasting friendship. But it is not an easy alliance. They both date the same Oxford boy who eventually marries his second choice of the two, Nancy. Freya realizes he is a scoundrel, but her friend can’t see it, not at first. There is a pattern of betrayal among these three characters, each deception crescendoing into a climax that may blow your bobby socks off. Spoiler: Only one false note seems to prevail and that is Freya, in the end, realizes she loves her friend, not in a platonic manner, but as a lover. This does not come out of nowhere; Quinn does subtly, perhaps too subtly, drop breadcrumb clues along the way, but there seems to be no inner struggle for Freya, no clues to the character herself that she could be a lesbian.

Others might argue that the author does inform. After all, Freya puts career ahead of all; she wishes not to marry (while having lots of sex with men) or have children; she blasts off into her life in any direction she wants with little regard for family or friends. She only has one other physical relationship with a woman, and it is in the context of a drunken orgy in which any woman might have sex with another woman. Again, very subtle. And perhaps it is as it should be. The period is late 1940s to late 1960s, a time of awakening, an explorative era in which women, even adventurous ones like Freya, may not know who they are inside and must be whacked up the side of the head by life itself to understand who they are. 

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Henry James's The American

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A Writer's Wit: Donald Barthelme

4/7/2022

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Painters, especially American painters since the Second World War, have been much more troubled, beset by formal perplexity, than American writers. They've been a laboratory for everybody.
​Donald Barthelme
Author of The Dead Father
Born April 7, 1931
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D. Barthelme
TOMORROW: My Book World | Anthony Quinn's Freya
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A Writer's Wit: Deborah Meier

4/6/2022

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There's a radical—and wonderful—new idea here . . . that all children could and should be inventors of their own theories, critics of other people's ideas, analyzers of evidence, and makers of their own personal marks on the world. Its an idea with revolutionary implications. If we take it seriously.
​Deborah Meier
Author of These Schools Belong to You and Me
Born April 6, 1931
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D. Meier
FRIDAY: My Book World | Anthony Quinn's Freya, a Novel
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A Writer's Wit: Caitlin Moran

4/5/2022

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When I talk to girls, they go, “I'm not a feminist.” And I say: “What? You don't want to vote? Do you want to be owned by your husband? Do you want your money from your job to go into his bank account? If you were raped, do you still want that to be a crime? Congratulations: you are a feminist.”
​Caitlin Moran
Author of More Than a Woman
​Born April 5, 1975
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C. Moran
FRIDAY: My Book World | Anthony Quinn's Freya, a Novel
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Writing at One Hundred

4/1/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
I think a lot of people of my generation are discomfited by the assertion of neutrality in the mainstream media, this idea that they're the voice of God. I think it's just honest to say, yes, you know where I'm coming from but you can fact-check anything I say.
​Rachel Maddow
Author of Bag Man
Born April 1, 1973
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R. Maddow

My Book World

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Wouk, Herman. Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-year-Old Author. New York: Simon, 2016.

The most fascinating aspect of this book may be indeed be Wouk’s age (b. May 27, 1915 and d. May 17, 2019, making him 10 days short of 104). One of the keys to his longevity may be that he never stops writing. In this slim tome, he relates the stories of each one of his books and how they come to be, but along with each one, he also shares where he is at the time. For example, while working on one novel for seven years, he and his wife buy a house in the Caribbean and reside there with their sons in paradise until he is finished. The book is a great way to become acquainted with his oeuvre if one isn’t already.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | *Anthony Quinn's Novel, Freya
(*British author, not the late American actor)

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A Writer's Wit: Enrique Vila-Matas

3/31/2022

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When it grows dark, we always need someone. This thought, the product of anxiety, only comes to me in the evenings, just when I'm about to end my writerly explorations.
​Enrique Vila-Matas
Author of Bartleby and Co
Born March 31, 1948
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E. Vila-Matas
TOMORROW: My Book World | Herman Wouk's Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author
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A Writer's Wit: Paul Reiser

3/30/2022

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Having a baby dragged me, kicking and screaming, from the world of self-absorption.
​Paul Reiser
Author of Familyhood 
Born March 30, 1957
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P. Reiser
FRIDAY: My Book World | Herman Wouk's Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author
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A Writer's Wit: Lara Logan

3/29/2022

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If you care about injustice, and if you care about freedom, and you care about human rights, then you care about them everywhere.
​Lara Logan
Television Journalist
Born March 29, 1971
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L. Logan
FRIDAY: My Book World | Herman Wouk's Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author
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Coppola: True to His Vision

3/25/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
If birds will abandon their young rather than miss the moment to begin a flight of thousands of miles, what migratory signals might our own cells still hold?
​Gloria Steinem
Author of My Life on the Road
Born March 25, 1934
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G. Steinem

My Book World

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Schumacher, Michael. Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker’s Life. New York: Crown, 1999.

If readers are fans of both film and director Coppola, this book is an embarrassment of riches—at least as far as it takes us, through 1998 when the book comes out. One may not realize, for example, how easy the 1970s seem for Coppola, succeeding beyond his wildest dreams with The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. The next twenty years are more arduous, and Coppola loses his credibility at times. He wishes to be more of an artiste, making films that appeal to him but perhaps not the public at large—or the studios. Even when he makes a big-budget, mass-appeal film, he is almost always at loggerheads with studio execs over scripts and, of course, money. He is a creative man, who also finances, for a time, his own studio, and even publishes a literary magazine, Zoetrope: All Story, which still exists today—not to mention a number of other enterprises including a winery. He ends the nineties having made enough money to dig himself out of debt and establish an independent life. Although he continues to make film, it is at his own pleasure. One has to admire that.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Herman Wouk's  Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author

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A Writer's Wit: Wilson Harris

3/24/2022

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Cross-culturality differs radically from multiculturality. There is no creative and re-creative sharing of dimensions in multiculturality.
​Wilson Harris
Author of Palace of the Peacock
Born March 24, 1921
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W. Harris
TOMORROW: My Book World | Michael Schumacher's Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker's Life
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A Writer's Wit: Erich Fromm

3/23/2022

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Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
​Erich Fromm
Author of The Art of Loving
Born March 23, 1900
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E. Fromm
FRIDAY: My Book World | Michael Schumacher's Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker's Life
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A Writer's Wit: Gabrielle Roy

3/22/2022

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One knows less about one's own destiny than about anything else on earth.
​Gabrielle Roy
Author of Children of My Heart
​Born March 22, 1909
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G. Roy
FRIDAY: My Book World | Michael Schumacher's Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker's Life
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How We Live, How We Die

3/18/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
I have never been convinced there's anything inherently wrong in having fun.
​George Plimpton
Author of Paper Lion
Born March 18, 1927
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G. Plimpton

My Book World

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Athill, Diana. Somewhere Towards the End: A Memoir. New York: Norton, 2009.

Diana Athill lived to be 101. She published this book at age ninety, ninety-one. An editor for a long time, she writes here and writes convincingly of her life, not only her old age but her younger life as well: her loves and losses, her miscarriage near menopause, her decision very early on that she doesn’t much care for children (though she mourns the child she loses, demonstrating a complexity of her own character). Somewhere towards the end of this thin tome, Athill states,

So an individual life is interesting enough to merit examination, and my own is the only one I really know (as Jean Rhys, faced with this same worry, always used to say), and if it is to be examined, it should be examined as honestly as is possible within the examiner’s inevitable limitations. To do it otherwise is pointless—and also makes very boring reading, as witness many autobiographies by celebrities of one sort or another” (181).
Athill’s longevity may, in part, be due to an active life, one in which she continues to learn how to do new things—not well or professionally, perhaps—but something novel nonetheless. One among many lessons we all might learn from her as we all slouch toward that same ending.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Michael Shumacher's  Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker’s Life
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A Writer's Wit: Penelope Lively

3/17/2022

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We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse: we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard.
​Penelope Lively
Author of Life in the Garden
Born March 17, 1933
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P. Lively
TOMORROW: My Book World | Diana Athill's Somewhere Towards the End: A Memoir
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A Writer's Wit: Daniel Patrick Moynihan

3/16/2022

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You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.
​Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Author of Secrecy: The American Experience
Born March 16, 1927
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D. P. Moynihan
FRIDAY: My Book World | Diana Athill's Somewhere Towards the End: A Memoir
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A Writer's Wit: Ruth Bader Ginsburg

3/15/2022

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At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.
​Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Author of My Own Words
Born March 15, 1933
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R. Bader Ginsburg
FRIDAY: My Book World | Diana Athill's Somewhere Toward the End: A Memoir
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Untold Railroad History

3/11/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT:
Bardot, Byron, Hitler, Hemingway, Monroe, Sade: we do not require our heroes to be subtle, just to be big. Then we can depend on someone to make them subtle.
​D. J. Enright
Author of The Oxford Book of Death
Born March 11, 1920
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D. J. Enright

My Book World

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Sedgwick, John. From the River to the Sea: The Untold Story of the Railroad War That Made the West.  New York: Avid, 2021.

If you’ve ever driven on an Interstate highway in the western United States—at posted speeds of 80 mph or faster, and people do zoom faster—it can seem as if you’re passing through a Disneyland sort of panorama. Mountains. Red arches. The occasional evergreen—with your AC cranked down low. In John Sedgwick’s book, however, one learns what it was like to traverse that terrain as a railroad builder, including the workers themselves.

Sedgwick traces the lives and work of two men—Strong erecting the Santa Fe and Palmer, the Rio Grande—who make “river to the sea” travel possible beginning in the late 1880s. This journey includes side trips by way of chapters devoted, for example, to the beloved Harvey House hotels, the first chain of its kind to provide bed, beverage, and breakfast along the way. Always, however, Sedgwick returns to the struggle these two men mount against the elements, terrain, and government (state and federal) but mostly against each other, to open up the West to the established civilization in the East. It is quite a ride, and Sedgwick ensures that you do not miss a minute of it.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Diana Athill's  Somewhere Towards the End

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A Writer's Wit: Pedro Antonio de Alarcón

3/10/2022

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On sherry: The destiny of a thousand generations is concentrated in each drop. If the cares of the world overwhelm you, only taste it, pilgrim, and you will swear that heaven is on earth.
​​Pedro Antonio de Alarcón
Author of The Tall Woman
​Born March 10, 1833
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P. A. de Alarcón
TOMORROW: My Book World | John Sedgwick's From the River to the Sea: The Untold Story of the Railroad War That Made the West
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A Writer's Wit: Vita Sackville-West

3/9/2022

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It is never wise to disregard the sagacity of those who do not learn their lore from books.
​Vita Sackville-West
Author of All Passion Spent
Born March 9, 1892
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V. Sackville-West
FRIDAY: My Book World | John Sedgwick's From the River to the Sea: The Untold Story of the Railroad War That Made the West
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A Writer's Wit: Claire Trevor

3/8/2022

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What a holler would ensue if people had to pay the minister as much to marry them as they have to pay a lawyer to get them a divorce.
​Claire Trevor
Actor: Starred in Murder, My Sweet 
Born March 8, 1910
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C. Trevor
FRIDAY: My Book World | John Sedgwick's From the River to the Sea: The Untold Story of the Railroad War That Made The West
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Splendid Is the Sun

3/4/2022

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A WRITER'S WIT
In many parts of the world, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. But I think we need women to solve the problems that men create.
​Khaled Hosseini
​Author of A Thousand Splendid Suns
​Born March 4, 1965
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K. Hosseini

My Book World

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Hosseini, Khaled. A Thousand Splendid Suns. New York: Riverhead, 2007.

Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, limns this portrait of two Afghanistan women that is both tragic and uplifting. Enemies at first, because they are married to the same abusive man, Mariam and Laila slowly realize their only way through life is to join together as friends. Both women are abused, one as a child, and both after their marriages. All this occurs over decades through the Soviet occupation and then the Taliban. The story ends just as the Americans enter the scene.

Surprises? The landscape. One is tempted to think that the entire country of Afghanistan is as dusty and dry as the movies and news videos that emerge, but Hosseini makes clear to readers that there are wet cycles, that there exist beautiful, mountainous vistas, as well. Another surprise: how misogynistic and cruel some Afghani men are, the women’s husband being a prime example. As the women toil to raise their children (a childless Mariam becomes a grandmother figure), they form a family structure of their own. After both suffering great losses, the story does end on a truly bright note: “But mostly, Mariam is in Laila’s own heart, where she shines with the bursting radiance of a thousand suns” (366). Hosseini possesses a strong understanding of the human condition.
 
NEXT FRIDAY: John Sedgwick's From the River to the Sea: The Untold Story of the Railroad War That Made the West

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A Writer's Wit: Jennifer Warnes

3/3/2022

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The job of singing is to stay open to the river of soul in all its manifestations, the dark and the light, without letting your ego get in the way. I never want to be bigger than the song. I just want you to receive it.
​Jennifer Warnes
Song Writer of "The Right Time of the Night"
Born March 3, 1947
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J. Warnes
TOMORROW: My Book World | John Sedgwick's From the River to the Sea: The Untold Story of the Railroad War That Made the West
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A Writer's Wit: John Irving

3/2/2022

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You don't want to dwell on your enemies, you know. I basically feel so superior to my critics for the simple reason that they haven't done what I do. Most book reviewers haven't written eleven novels. Many of them haven't written one.
​John Irving
Author of A Prayer for Owen Meany
Born March 2, 1942
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J. Irving
FRIDAY: My Book World | John Sedwick's From the River to the Sea: The Untold Story of the Railroad War That Made the West
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A Writer's Wit: Ralph Ellison

3/1/2022

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I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
​Ralph Ellison
​Author of Invisible Man
Born March 1, 1914
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R. Ellison
FRIDAY: My Book World | John Sedgwick's From the River to the Sea: The Untold Story of the Railroad War That Made the West
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