Sunday Survey

Less than 2 weeks left to finish To Kill A Mockingbird! How's it going?

5=I love it!
4=I really like it.
3=I like it.
2=It's just okay.
1=I don't like it.

Saturday Spotlight

Today's author is Stephen Hawking.


He was born on 8 January 1942 in Oxford, England. He attended St. Albans School and Oxford where he studied physics. He continued his studies in cosmology at Cambridge. He held the post of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge for thirty years (it was once held by Isaac Newton). He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a lifetime member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. In 2009 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He is especially known for his research on black holes. He has ALS (Lous Gehrig's Disease).

His most famous books are A Brief History of Time and The Universe in a Nutshell. His latest book is called The Grand Design.














Have you read any of his books?

Feature Fridays

Today's classic is Pygmalion (1912) by George Bernard Shaw.

Written in 1912, Pygmalion quickly became a legend in its own time. The characters, situations, and dialogue supplied are rich, ebullient, and unmatched in wit as the infamous Henry Higgins prepares to "make a duchess of this draggletailed guttersnipe."

Thus begins this classic tale as Shaw pokes fun at smugness and priggish conventionality. Who can forget professor Henry Higgins with his passionate interest in the science of phonetics and the improvement of British speech, or of course, poor Eliza Doolittle, who is one of the great heroines of the 20th century?

Get ready to enjoy the greatest Shaw romp of them all as Higgins prepares to transform a common flower girl into a creature "the king of England would accept as royalty."

You can read the play online for free at Read Print.

Did you know? The famous musical My Fair Lady is based on the play Pygmalion.

Thoughts for Thursday

From BTT today...If you see a movie that was adapted from a book, do you go back and read the book after you've seen it?

I think it's better to read the book first if you're going to read it. But, I did make one exception recently. After I saw The Blind Side, I immediately bought the book (that same night before going home) because I loved it so much.

Wednesday Wish List

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen


Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul—the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor, who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter's dreams. Together with Walter—environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, total family man—she was doing her small part to build a better world.

But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter taken a job working with Big Coal? What exactly is Richard Katz—outré rocker and Walter's college best friend and rival—still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street become "a very different kind of neighbor," an implacable Fury coming unhinged before the street's attentive eyes?

In his first novel since The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen has given us an epic of contemporary love and marriage. Freedom comically and tragically captures the temptations and burdens of liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, the heavy weight of empire. In charting the mistakes and joys of Freedom's characters as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever more confusing world, Franzen has produced an indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time.

Remember the whole Oprah controversy back in 2001?

Franzen was raised here in St. Louis. He'll be back here at the St. Louis Public Library Schlafly Branch on Euclid on September 20th @ 7pm (it's a free reading)!

The Guardian is calling Freedom the novel of the century.

Gotta read this one!