Terrifying Trivia Answers

Last week, I posted some Halloween-related literature questions to test your knowledge. Now that the happy holiday has arrived, so have the answers:

1. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, what kind of animal/creature was Shelob?
Giant spider (also acceptable: spider; evil in the form of a spider)

2. In Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, who does the Headless Horseman pursue through the night?
Ichabod Crane

3. According to Arthurian legends, this wizard served as Arthur’s advisor until the Lady of the Lake traps him.
Merlin (as read in T.H. White’s The Once and Future King or Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court)

4. Who conquers a group of fearsome monsters with one scary look, becoming King of the Wild Things?
Max (Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are)

5. In what Roald Dahl book does each witch make it a goal to vanquish at least one child a week?
The Witches

6. This hero’s parents died on Halloween, but he mysteriously survived and became known as “the boy who lived.”
Harry Potter (J.K. Rowling's series)

7. He was a Transylvanian nobleman who lived in a decaying castle in the mountains and had three wives.
Dracula (Bram Stoker's Dracula)

Congratulations to PG for getting all the correct answers!

"Bewitching" Books

I live in Massachusetts, just north of Boston and a quick car ride away from Salem. With Halloween two days away, it's hard not to get caught up in the season. I also got an Amazon.com gift certificate in the mail yesterday, which was destined to be used within 24 hours - I just don't have that kind of restraint when it comes to books.

Anyway, I finally bought my own copy of Kathleen Kent's The Heretic's Daughter after borrowing my friend's. My purchase got me thinking about my favorite witch-related stories, since I am so close to Salem and Halloween is upon us. So here I present a short list of my favorite "bewitching" books:

• The Crucible by Arthur Miller (classic and sometimes scarily relevant)
• The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare
  
• The Witches by Roald Dahl
• The Heretic's Daughter by Kathleen Kent
• Wicked by Greogory Maguire
  
• The Sweep series by Cate Tiernan
• Three Sisters Island trilogy by Nora Roberts

Don't forget to check back on Friday for the answers to last week's "Terrifying Trivia of the Literary Kind" quiz.

"And again, the night would be long"

“To read it is to lose one's own innocence about the Holocaust all over again.”

- Ruth Franklin, New Republic review of Night

Tonight, at Boston University, as a part of the university’s celebration in honor of Elie Wiesel’s 80th birthday, Wiesel will give his annual plenary lecture, this year on Kristallnacht. (Tickets are sold out for the lecture – I know, I tried.)

2008 also marks the 48th anniversary of the English publication of Night, perhaps Wiesel’s best-known work. I rarely make universal book recommendations, simply because each person is different and each person will like different books. Night, however, is one of the few exceptions.

Night is one of those books that doesn’t just stay with you; it haunts you. In a New Republic review of the book, Ruth Franklin wrote that Night was “the most devastating account of the Holocaust that [she had] ever read.” It is unflinching and, at times, difficult to read. Wiesel offers no rationale or explanations. The words are simple and plain, the story short. It simply is. Whereas The Diary of Anne Frank gave us a relatively sheltered glimpse of the Holocaust (sheltered in the sense that we never read directly about Anne’s experience in the concentration camps), Night holds nothing back. When a friend asked me to describe the book to her, the first word that popped into my head was “harrowing.” And that’s an apt description – of Wiesel’s experiences certainly, but also of the reader’s journey.

In her review (which is a good read, if you’ve got the time), Franklin also explores the difficulty of categorizing Night (is it autobiography? memoir? something else?), the need to balance truthfulness and literature, and the differences between the various editions (Yiddish, French and English).

Below is an interview Wiesel gave with Charlie Rose in 1994 after going back to the Buchenwald concentration camp for the first time (Wiesel was transferred to Buchenwald in January 1945 after being in Auschwitz):




What books would you universally recommend to people? Do you think there are some books everyone “should” read? What’s on your Must Read List?

"OMG, You HAVE to read this..."

I find myself saying that a lot. Well, maybe not the "OMG" part, but I'm always coming across new things to read and then passing them along to friends or family. In fact, my recent raves about Twilight right here on The Librarian Next Door led my friend Meghan (she of "Dancing A La Mode" fame) to go out and buy all the books in the series.

So because of my affinity for passing along good reads, I'm trying something new. Chuck Westbrook had an idea about driving up traffic for blogs with great content, but no readers. This is the age of citizen journalism, people! Who says those New York Times and Newsweek people should get all the love? There are thousands - maybe millions - of us "regular folks" out there with a lot to say and a blog that's a great read.

Chuck's idea is to take a group of people and have them all read the same blog for two weeks. After the two weeks is up, the group moves on to another blog. The idea is to highlight great reads that people don't know about. I like to think of it as Amazon.com's "You Might Also Like This..." but for blogs.

I've already thrown my hat into the ring for Chuck's experiment. You should, too. You never know when you'll find that great, unknown read.

(Note: Usually, I just stick to books here at The Librarian Next Door, but I think this idea is worth bending the rules for.)

Terrifying Trivia of the Literary Kind

In honor of the fact that Halloween is a week away, I present to you, fellow bookworms, a eerie exam of your Halloween-related literary knowledge. Post your answers in the comments and come back next week to see if your head is full of brains.....or pumpkin mush.



1. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, what kind of animal/creature was Shelob?

2. In Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, who does the Headless Horseman pursue through the night?

3. According to Arthurian legends, this wizard served as Arthur’s advisor until the Lady of the Lake traps him.

4. Who conquers a group of fearsome monsters with one scary look, becoming King of the Wild Things?

5. In what Roald Dahl book does each witch make it a goal to vanquish at least one child a week?

6. This hero’s parents died on Halloween, but he mysteriously survived and became known as “the boy who lived.”

7. He was a Transylvanian nobleman who lived in a decaying castle in the mountains and had three wives.

Harry Potter Contest Alert!

How awesome!

Scholastic announced today that to celebrate the December 4, 2008 launch of The Tales of Beedle the Bard, written and illustrated by J.K. Rowling, Scholastic will sponsor a national essay contest for American kids to attend a once-in-a lifetime event in Edinburgh, Scotland with J.K. Rowling.

Children between the ages of 8 and 17 have to write a 200-words or less essay describing how they have helped others. The proceeds from the sales of Beedle the Bard are going towards the Children's High Level Group charity, an organization Rowling helped found.

This is such a great way to get kids reading and writing and helping out others at the same time. Too bad I don't fall into the age requirements. Otherwise, I would enter!

Anne with an E

With Halloween about two weeks away, I spent part of my weekend helping my sister find Halloween costumes for my two nephews. It got me feeling nostalgic for Halloweens past and all the literary characters I pretended to be.

If it wasn't already abundantly clear, I spent a lot of my childhood reading (probably more than was good for me) and so, when it came to Halloween, I almost always wanted to be my favorite character from a book. Halloween allows us to embody an entirely different persona. I loved the idea that I could "be" Anne Shirley (Anne of Green Gables), Jo March (Little Women) or Laura Ingalls Wilder (Little House on the Prairie).

Of course, these days, it seems every kid wants a Halloween costume from their favorite movie or television show. And there's nothing wrong with that. But I liked being a character from the book. It forced you to be creative. Absent any meticulously detailed descriptions, you had to use your imagination and come up with your own idea of what this character or that character looked like. Best of all, there was no right or wrong. I may not have had Anne Shirley's red hair, but I did share her freckles. I could be the brown-haired Anne and no one could tell me otherwise.

Halloween is a day/night that lets us be whoever we want to be for a little while. When I was younger, I loved being able to escape into these books and imagine I really was at Green Gables or on the Ingalls family farm.

So bookworms - what were your favorite literary characters? Who did you want to be when you were little? Who do you still want to be?

R U Reading?

In July, the New York Times published an article on the literary debate between reading online versus reading offline (i.e. books). At one point, author Motoko Rich writes:

"Clearly, reading in print and on the Internet are different. On paper, text has a predetermined beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author’s vision. On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends."

I think there's clearly value in reading, regardless of what form it takes, but I guess I'd have to say that reading online doesn't - or can't - replace reading offline. Online reading definitely develops a different skill set and maybe even increases a person's ability to process information. But for me, it comes down to attention span. Reading online can be erratic and frenzied - we want information and we want it now! In the Web world, everything is (mostly) instantaneous and immediate. We're all plugged in and barraged with constant streams of information. We don't have to read everything start to finish to get the main idea. Reading offline, however, requires a focus that isn't as prevalent as it used to be.

But most importantly, I think reading online keeps you from reading things you wouldn't have otherwise. When you read online, you're almost always reading something you were already looking for. Reading offline results in more "happy accidents," where you find something you didn't know you wanted. (Note: of course, as I typed that, I realized that Amazon.com has a great way of introducing you to books you might not have bought through the "other users also bought this" and "you might like this" features.)

So, what do you think? Is there a fundamental difference between reading online versus reading offline? Does it matter?

(And yes, I do realize the inherent irony of writing about this on an Internet blog.)

"Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body."

- Sir Richard Steele, Irish writer and politician

"Wicked" Good

Sorry for the pun, but I couldn't resist. And where I come from, "wicked" as an adjective and adverb is a positive thing.

Anyway, the latest book in Gregory Maguire's Wicked Cycle was released today. For those not in the know, it all started in 1996 when Maguire published Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, a retelling of L. F. Baum's The Wizard of Oz. Maguire's book reimagined the Wicked Witch as Elphaba, a green-skinned and misunderstood free spirit. 10 years later, in 2006, Maguire published the sequal, Son of a Witch. Now we have the third book, A Lion Among Men: Year 3 in the Wicked Years.

Most people know Wicked because it was adapted into a popular and successful Broadway musical. Having read the book and seen the musical, I can tell you that they have little in common. The musical is very loosely based on the book, which is much more detailed and complex. (The musical is not bad; the music's quite catchy. I just wouldn't see it expecting a faithful interpretation.)

Maguire has such a fantastic imagination. He really did take these well-known characters and make them his own. He is adept at taking traditional stories and twisting them on their heads. Most of his adult novels are revisionist in this regards, but the Wicked Cycle books are by far the best known and the best selling.

Here's a good interview with him from Barnes and Noble. Note the shelf display in the background of the video; it's stacked with copies of his books. That's a nice bit of synergy on behalf of that particular B&N.

#1

Well, it had to happen sometime. 

According to the latest edition of Entertainment Weekly magazine, Stephenie Meyer's Breaking Dawn (a personal favorite of mine) has finally been dethroned from the #1 hardcover fiction bestseller spot by David Wroblewski's The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. 

Of course, since Wrokblewski's book was recently "endorsed" by Oprah, it's not all that surprising. And therein, my friends, lies the power of the O brand. 

While I'm usually loathe to read books just because Oprah Winfrey says so, I've been hearing good things about Edgar Sawtelle. What do you guys think? Is it worth my time? How would you rate Oprah's taste in books? 

Based on the book by...

I enjoy Fridays. I enjoy this particular Friday even more because I woke up this morning to find the latest Twilight trailer making the Internet rounds. Ever since I started reading Stephenie Meyer's series this summer, I've been addicted - literally. I actually read all four books in one week straight. It was almost enough to send me into Twilight overload. Now, I get to be excited and geeky about the movie, coming out in November. 

I'll admit - I approach movies based on books with a bit of apprehension. I've always considered myself a reader first, filmgoer second. Movie adaptations of books are a kind of slippery slope; they can be excellent or they can be horrible. Anything in the middle usually doesn't get remembered. Even when I enjoy the movie as a movie, I still tend to think the book was/is better. 

I think a lot of screenwriters and/or Hollywood studio types get tripped up trying to decide how much of the original to keep and how much to rewrite. You can't simply take all the dialogue from a book and make it the screenplay. It just wouldn't work. But if you completely rewrite everything, you lose a good deal of the je ne sais quoi of the original. This applies even when the author has a hand in the movie. J.K. Rowling has been actively involved with the Harry Potter movies, but the first few movies, which stuck to a more literal adaptation, were not nearly as entertaining as the later ones that tried to strike a balance between book and movie. 

Having said all that, I think there are some movies that do transcend the original book or at least measure up to it. In my opinion, I thought Joe Wright did an fantastic job of brining Ian McEwan's Atonement to the big screen. I wouldn't rank it higher than the book, but I think it's fairly even. Additionally, I have to say that I liked Peter Jackson's adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings more than the books. I realize I'm treading dangerous close to blasphemy here, but hear me out. Tolkien's books are incredibly rich and detailed, but the man took five pages to describe a meadow! Jackson and Co. knew how to bring the most important plot points to the movie without dragging it down. The books are still worth reading - several times, in fact. But the movies are a force all their own. 

So fellow bookworms: what's your take? Movie adaptations of books: yea or nay? Are there any movies that are better than the books? Any upcoming movies based on books that you're particularly looking forward to? 

A Hamlet for the Next Generation

Writing my last post, I was reminded of this great Hamlet retelling (spoof?) from the crazy and brainy folks over at McSweeney's Internet Tendency.

For the "web 2.0-Facebook-MySpace" generation, McSweeney's (via author Sarah Schmelling) posted Hamlet: Facebook News Feed Edition. It probably won't be as entertaining to those who don't know Facebook - or Hamlet for that matter. But for those of us who know and love both, this is pure brilliance (this is only a sampling; for the full post - and it really is worth reading - click here): 

Horatio thinks he saw a ghost.

Hamlet thinks it's annoying when your uncle marries your mother right after your dad dies.

The king thinks Hamlet's annoying.

Laertes thinks Ophelia can do better.

Hamlet's father is now a zombie.

- - - -

The king poked the queen.

The queen poked the king back.

Hamlet and the queen are no longer friends.

Marcellus is pretty sure something's rotten around here.

Hamlet became a fan of daggers. 

Words, Words, Words

R: What are you playing at?

G: Words, words. They're all we have to go on. 

The exchange above, taken from Tom Stoppard's glorious play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, is really quite indicative of so many things. Stoppard's play was, in part, about the complexities and ever-changing quality of language. Even his source material (Shakespeare's Hamlet, of course) dealt with the words we say and what we really mean. Both plays are, naturally, brilliant. But they're also prescient because they understood long before most that words themselves have a kind of power. We communicate primarily through words. The fact that so many of them have multiple meanings makes it increasingly difficult to really understand what someone is saying. 

Today, you can't say anything without it being repeated ad nauseam. In fact, depending on who you are, the minute you open your mouth, there are people just waiting to dissect every syllable. Often times, we can't explain "what we meant to say" because we're so busy trying to explain what we actually did say. In a world that thrives on sound bites, every word literally does count. 

So what does this have to do with books? Everything. So many people don't read actual books anymore; nowadays, everything is media-based: e-books, blogs, online fan fiction, etc. And yet books keep getting published, which means competition for a reader's attention is fierce. So here is my bit of advice for authors out there: make your words count, from the very first page! Be deliberate with the words you use and grab my attention right away, or else I probably won't keep reading. I obviously don't have you over my shoulder, telling me what you are trying to say through your characters. All I can do is read what's on the page and try to make sense of it. If you say one thing but mean another, there's no guarantee that I'm going to understand. 

So make your words count. They're all we have to go on. 

Beedle the Bard

It's time for some true confessions: I'm a 20-something graduate student and I love Harry Potter. I realize I'm not alone, but sometimes it helps to remind myself of that fact. 

I could, quite easily, write all about my Harry Potter love, but instead I'm simply going to gush about J.K. Rowling's next release: The Tales of Beedle the Bard.

Most Harry fans will recognize the name of the book as an integral plot point in The Deathly Hallows. Rowling is taking those fables from Harry's world and bringing it into ours. In the same tradition of Aesops' fables and the stories of the Brothers Grimm, Beedle the Bard has tales for children, adults and everyone in between. But the best part? Dumbledore himself makes an appearance in the book! His own notes, annotations and comments on the stories appear in the margins, in what I'm told is his own handwriting. 

So, fellow Potter fans, are you looking forward to Beedle the Bard? Is there any other part of Harry's world you'd like to see brought to life (so to speak)? I personally would like to think that "The Lost Diaries of Hermione Granger" are out there somewhere. How about you?

Also, because I can't resist: Potter Puppet Theater & the Mysterious Ticking Noise:

The "True" Story

I recently finished reading Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card for the hundredth (give or take a few) time. There's just something about the book that keeps drawing me back, compelling me to read it again and again. 

It's certainly well-known. It was originally published as a short story / novelette in 1977 and won the Hugo Award (in 1986) and the Nebula Award (in 1985). Of course, it's been updated with numerous print versions since, many with commentary about it's importance. (Side note: in an awesome and exciting new chapter of this story, Card is teaming up with Marvel Comics to release the Ender's Game graphic novel in late 2008 / early 2009. Yay!)

But it's more than just prestige. There are times when I'm reading and I forget it was written in the '70's because it feels so relevant. Even though Card was writing about a future that doesn't exist (at least yet), his ideas about politics, philosophy, and the "nets" have a prescience that's almost eerie. And then there's the realness of the book. I never doubted for a minute when reading that any of this could be real: aliens, space travel, intergalactic wars, etc. Card writes with such earnestness that you don't question it, you don't worry about believability -- it just is. 

But I think the thing I like the best about Ender's Game is that the story is different every time I read it. There's always something new about it, always a new way to look at it and discover it. Card is a great writer because his work lets you bring your own experience to it. The first time I read the book, Ender's Game was a science-fiction novel about buggers and space wars and battles. Another time, it was about power and leadership. After taking several theology and philosophy classes in college, I re-read the book and saw the philosophical and religious aspects of it. And this last time, with an important election coming up, I re-read the book and was fascinated with the political maneuvering that takes place. 

Each time, it's like I'm reading a whole new book. That's where Card's true story lies - not in the words on the page, but in the minds of the readers as their own experiences, thoughts and ideas breathe new life into an old story. 

Fans of Ender's Game will also love the rest of the series, especially Speaker for the Dead, the first sequel and Ender's Shadow, a retelling of Ender's Game from a different character's point of view.