Three Cups of Tea, the book for our October meeting, has a pretty interesting website if you're want to learn more about the author and his education project. There's list of links to book reviews and articles as well as links to various author interviews.
California author William Saroyan's life and work is commemorated in SFGate article on the centennial (or thereabouts) of his birth, August 31, 1908. Saroyan's best known works include The Time of Your Life and The Human Comedy.
Just a reminder that Reader's Roundtable will be meeting this Saturday (9/6) at 2:00 pm in Conference Room B (check the lobby monitor just in case we get bumped) to discuss the novel Sweetness in the Belly.
It takes a special kind of literary genius to mangle the English language this horribly. Thanks Linda for forwarding the results of the 2008 Bulwar-Lytton Contest!
Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest
2008 Results
Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped "Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J."
Garrison Spik
Washington, D.C.
The winner of 2008 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is Garrison Spik (pronounced "speak"), a 41-year-old communications director and writer from Washington, D.C. Hailing from Moon Township, Pennsylvania, he has worked in Tokyo, Bucharest, and Nitro, West Virginia, and cites DEVO, Nathaniel Hawthorne, B horror films, and historiography as major life influences.
Garrison Spik is the 26th grand prize winner of the contest that began at San Jose State University in 1982.
An international literary parody contest, the competition honors the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is childishly simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Although best known for "The Last Days of Pompeii" (1834), which has been made into a movie three times, originating the expression "the pen is mightier than the sword," and phrases like "the great unwashed" and "the almighty dollar," Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that the "Peanuts" beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, "It was a dark and stormy night."
You can read other cringe-worthy entries at the Bulwar-Lytton website.
Two NYTimes articles tickled my funny bone this past Sunday...maybe they'll tickle yours as well.Slow-Moving VehicleThe second article that gave me a chuckle explores the disease gout and its literary connections. The last paragraph is priceless.
Traffic jams are not, by and large, caused by flaws in road design but by flaws in human nature. While this is bad news for drivers — there’s not much to be done about human nature — it is good news for readers of Tom Vanderbilt’s new book. “Traffic” is not a dry examination of highway engineering; it’s a surprising, enlightening look at the psychology of human beings behind the steering wheels. An alternate title for the book might be “Idiots.” (Link to article.)
My Literary Malady
So, it has come to this. It’s official. My doctor has confirmed what I had suspected for some time, that despite some “nonstandard presentation” and my solid belief that this sort of thing happens only to other people, I have gout. I am a member of that shadowy, shameful group, the “gout community.” (Link to article.)
Talk about convenient, finish one book and then grab another from your chair's armrest. Cool!Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?...As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.
But others say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount. The Web inspires a teenager like Nadia, who might otherwise spend most of her leisure time watching television, to read and write.
Even accomplished book readers like Zachary Sims, 18, of Old Greenwich, Conn., crave the ability to quickly find different points of view on a subject and converse with others online. Some children with dyslexia or other learning difficulties, like Hunter Gaudet, 16, of Somers, Conn., have found it far more comfortable to search and read online. (Link to entire article.)
We're meeting tomorrow to discuss Madhur Jaffrey's memoir Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India.
