On August 11, 2014, thousands of teens and their parents eagerly purchased tickets for the long-awaited film adaptation of Lois Lowry's 1994 Newbery Award-winning novel The Giver. My teenaged son read it in junior high and loved it. I loved it too. Like Madelyn L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, Lowry's The Giver has a subterranean…
Did you ever suspect the runaway best-seller Fifty Shades of Grey was written by robots? Well, somebody check E.L. James for vital signs because she might actually be an algorithm. Check this out: Surely a human being would die of boredom before biting a lip in print forty-three times in one novel. Actually, I'm skewing…
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Must. Remind. Self.. The OED is not an arbiter of, but a chronicler of, English language use. Every year, the Powers-That-Be lean over the windowsills located high atop their Ivory Towers and cock an ear towards the milling crowds below. When they hear a word they do not recognize being shouted often enough, they dip…
Is your Kindle finger itching? Do you have a yearning to go to the bookstore or library but don't know what sounds good? Well, maybe this will help. Last night, this year's National Book Awards were announced. Here is the complete list of winners and finalists. James McBride took the fiction prize for his novel…
The world lost two influential literary voices this week. Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing, best known for her novel The Golden Notebook, passed away Sunday at age 94. And Barbara Park, author of the beloved children's books featuring her irascible character Junie B. Jones, died Friday after a long battle with ovarian cancer. Park was 66. While it may…
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Nobel Prize-winning poet, essayist, and professor Joseph Brodsky In 1972, poet Joseph Brodsky angered government officials in his native Russia and was expelled from the country. With the help of fellow poet W.H. Auden, Brodsky settled in the United States, found a position at Yale and taught classes at Mount Holyoke as…
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True Story: I remember getting my library card more vividly than I recall getting my driver's license. My best memories of childhood were going to the library with my mom and checking out armfuls of books, which she would read to me for hours on end. At two, I am told, I would stand on…
Today would have been Albert Camus's 100th birthday. I have had a crush on Albert Camus for a long time. C'mon... he's hot, rebellious, an intellectual, and like most artists I'm madly in love with, dead... the ultimate unattainable. Although he is often called an existentialist, Camus rejected that label ("Sartre and I are often…
