November Author Birthdays

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happy birthday pile of books

November Author Birthdays

Nicholasa Mohr (Nilda, A Matter of Pride and Other Stories)  11/1

Gyo Fujikawa (Millie’s Secret, Welcome is a Wonderful World)  11/3

Sterling North (Rascal, Midnight and Jeremiah)  11/4

Armstrong Sperry (Call It Courage)  11/7

Benjamin Bova (THX 1138 [with George Lucas], The Winds of Altair)  11/8

Marianna Mayer (Vasilisa the Brave, Baba Yaga)  11/8

Bram Stoker (Dracula)  11/8

Kate Seredy (The White Stag)  11/10

Marjorie Benchley (Nate the Great series, Rollo and Juliet)  11/12

Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island) 11/13

Astrid Lindgren (Pippi Longstocking) 11/14

William Steig (Shrek, CDB, Doctor De Soto)  11/14

Nancy Tafuri (Have You Seen My Duckling?)  11/14

David McCord (An Acre for Education, One At a Time) 11/15

Daniel Pinkwater (The Hoboken Chicken Emergency, The Big Orange Splot)  11/15

Miroslav Sasek (This is Paris, Mike and the Modelmakers) 11/18

Carlo Lorenzini – wrote as Carlo Collodi (Pinocchio)  11/24

Sylvia Engdahl (Stewards of the Flame, Journey Between Worlds)  11/24

Yoshiko Uchida (Journey to Topaz: The Story of a Japanese American Evacuation) 11/24

Crescent Dragonwagon (To Take a Dare, The Cornbread Gospels)  11/25

P.D. Eastman (Are You My Mother? Go, Dog, Go!)  11/25

Marc Brown (Arthur series)  11/25

Doris Gates (A Fair Wind for Troy)  11/26

Charles Shulz (Peanuts)  11/26

Tomi Ungerer (Rigor Mortis, The Joy of Frogs) 11/28

Louisa May Alcott (Little Women, Little Men)  11/29

Madeleine L’Engle (A Wind in the Door, A Wrinkle in Time) 11/29

C.S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters)  11/29

Lucy Maud Montgomery (Anne of Green Gables)  11/30

Johnathan Swift (Gulliver’s Travels, A Modest Proposal)  11/30

Mark Twain (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn)  11/30

Countdown to Halloween: War of the Worlds

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In case you haven’t had enough scary stories for the Halloween season, maybe it’s time to check out War of the Worlds.  The adaptation for radio broadcast was directed and narrated by Orson Welles, and performed by The Mercury Theater on the Air on this date in 1938, and supposedly inspired a nation-wide panic that actual Martians were actually invading Earth and actually taking over. Sources disagree on exactly how much panic occurred, but apparently some did happen – the city of Concrete, Washington, for example, coincidentally experienced a phone and electrical power outage right around the time of the broadcast, and in other areas, tensions from World War II led to more than a little alarm about invaders from beyond. Subsequent productions and remakes also caused alarm, such as in Quito, Ecuador, in 1949, and Lisbon, Portugal, in 1958. (How did this happen? How were listeners not completely clear that this was just a performance? Check out this article). But then again, maybe little or no panic actually happened, and it was all media hype. Given what appears to be a shocking amount of gullibility regarding news, fake news, science, and infotainment on all ends of the political spectrum today, I have to believe a whole lot of people were fooled by Welles’s broadcast, if not actually induced to “panic”.

War of the Worlds shaped the direction of science fiction as well as popular media in general. The radio broadcast demonstrated how easy it is for the media to present “alternative facts” while discrediting “fake news” in ways that viewers and readers will believe.

Haven’t read War of the Worlds yet? Read it for free in any one of several formats!  Want to know more about what you’re reading, about was going on in the world, what influenced Wells’ writing?  Check out this study guide.

Let me know what you think, eh?

(And while we’re at it – want to understand “fake news” better? Try some of these books)

 

LFL Stewards Holiday Swap: Halloween

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I’m part of the Library Steward Exchange group on Facebook. They do holiday swaps and the like. I sent mine off to my Exchange partner earlier this week. Yesterday I got my present. Woo!  A pack of four black cat ear headbands, a book bag from a local book fair, Halloween garland, a bag of Starbursts, a package of little bags with Peanut Butter M&Ms, a bookmark also from the local book fair, Halloween-themed pencils, Curious George’s Halloween, Katy Duck’s Happy Halloween, Folks This Ain’t Normal by Joel Salatin, a journal/notebook – and the lines you write on are actual text from Jane Eyre in teeny-tiny font, and Third Thursday Community Potluck Cookbook by Nancy Vienneau. So much awesome in here! The kid books are going in my Little Free Library straight away, and I’ll be reading the Salatin and Vienneau books before deciding whether to keep or share them. The husband has already claimed some of the candy. I will probably share the headbands and pencils with my kids at work. I’ll put the garland in my Little Free Library too.

Thank you so much, Sam!

Looking forward to the Winter Holiday swap!

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