F. Scott Fitzgerald reads Keats

Another commemoration of the author's death provides us with audio of Fitzgerald rather oddly reading Ode to a Nightingale. Plus there's links to some other audio. It's all a little sad, actually.

The death of F. Scott Fitzgerald

It was 70 years ago. The piece in Reader's Almanac is quite poignant. 'F. Scott Fitzgerald was in his fourth year working as a screenwriter in Hollywood, although with fewer assignments and less pay. He hoped the novel he was working on, The Love of the Last Tycoon, would revive his literary reputation. Few people were still reading him. His August 1940 royalty statement from Scribner’s reported sales of forty copies of his works (including seven copies of The Great Gatsby and nine of Tender Is the Night) for a total payment of $13.13.' More...

Keillor on Twain

If you didn't read the review in the NY Times, you might want to listen to the podcast.

Promoting lifelong literacy

If you don't start people reading as kids, they won't start later on. The Library of Congress, the Ad Council and Disney are trying to do something about that. 'The good news is that finding good books is increasingly easy. Today, kids can access literature through e-books, blogs, websites, magazines, and comic books, not to mention traditional bound books. The format doesn't matter; what matters is that the child is engaged in reading.' More...

Famous writers reading other famous writers

The Guardian is putting together a series of 12 podcasts, with the likes of Philip Pullman reading Chekhov and William Boyd reading J.G. Ballard. Thanks to Open Culture for the link:

Best children's books

There's so many best-of-the-year lists that if we covered them all, we wouldn't have to cover anything else. And I don't necessarily agree with a lot of them, for that matter. But I'll make an exception for this one, Smithsonian’s 2010 Notable Books for Children. If you still have some Christmas shopping to do, you might want to start here.

Edward Hopper

I'm intrigued by Edward Hopper. What he does with composition especially gets me thinking, although most critics concentrate on the apparent lost-ness of his subjects. Granted this article has nothing to do with books, but if you've seen Hopper painings and thought about them, you'll enjoy it. 'Hopper spent time in Europe during the 1920s. He was living in Paris on and off when the ex-pat scene was at its very height. Impressively, it doesn't seem to have affected him much at all. That's what you want to admire about Hopper. His Americanness was so real, and so deeply rooted, that continental trends and ideas bounced right off him. He was still trying to find his way as a painter in the '20s. He had every reason to dabble in the trends. But he didn't. He didn't want to be an abstract painter. His mind was not blown by Cubism. He did not succumb to the excitement of any avant-garde. How many of us have ever shown that kind of resolution? It is not that Hopper lacked ambition. He wanted to be a great painter. He wanted to be relevant. And yet he stuck to his realism, to his representational style, to everything that was being rejected by so many of the celebrated painters of his day. Admirable.' More...