Now that the weather is frightful, wouldn't it be delightful to find a great read for the holidays? Courtesy of our fall "First Lines & Factiods" contest, check out these interesting reads. Thank you to our many great entrants who submitted all of the below books and facts.
My Life Next Door by Huntley Fitzpatrick
(submitted by Najla Morgan)
First line: "The Garretts were forbidden from the start."
Interesting fact: "On Huntley Fitzpatrick's 10th birthday, her father gave her a typewriter, a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes, and a bottle of scotch. He also gave her a note telling her to "Be Bold, Be Bold, Be Bold." Huntley passed on the scotch and cigarettes, but kept writing." (
author's website)
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
(submitted by Nicole Johnson)
First Line: "The Salinas Valley is in Northern California."
Interesting Fact: "Years after her husband's death, Elaine Steinbeck went to a bookstore in Japan asking if they carried copies of
The Grapes of Wrath. The owner was puzzled, not recognizing the title. "It's by John Steinbeck," she insisted. "Oh," said the owner, finally understanding her request. "You mean
The Angry Raisins." (
Steinbeck's biography @ Oprah.com)
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
(submitted by Colton Claughton, Megan Morehouse, Marcel Ortiz, Sean Smith)
First Line: "In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit."
Interesting Facts: "Tolkien, a professor of linguistics at Oxford, was grading exams and came upon a blissfully blank page. He wrote the first line of the book without having any notion of what a 'hobbit' was at the time. This anecdote suggests that if more students endeavoured to be succinct in essay exams, we might have more classics of literature." (
Annotated Hobbit, Sean Smith)
"Tolkien was a codebreaker in World War II." (
tolkiensociety.org)
"
The Hobbit was written for Tolkien's children. It was by luck that a person working for a publishing company came across it and then convinced Tolkien to publish the book, which Tolkien hadn't previously intended to do." (
tolkiensociety.org)
"Tolkien and his wife, Edith, are buried together in a single grave in the Catholic section of Wolvercote cemetery in the northern suburbs of Oxford. The headstone reads: 'Edith Mary Tolkien, Luthien, 1889-1971' and 'John Ronald Reul Tolkien, Beren, 1892-1973.' The character names are from
The Silmarillion. (
IMDB)
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
(submitted by Amanda Page)
First Line: "The circus arrives without warning."
Interesting Fact: "Morgenstern is an artist as well as a writer." (
goodreads.com)
I Was Told There'd Be Cake by Sloan Crosley
(submitted by Thomas McNamara)
First Line: "As most New Yorkers have done, I have given serious and generous thought to the state of my apartment should I get killed during the day."
Interesting Fact: "Sloan Crosley wrote the cover story for the worst-selling issue of
Maxim in the magazine's history." (
author's bio)
Haunted Mesa by Louis L'Amour
(submitted by Don Connors)
First Line: "It was night, and he was alone upon the desert."
Interesting Fact: "Louis L'Amour spent much of his time in libraries and bookstores across the United States and all over the world. He was known to brag about reading more than one hundred and fifty non-fiction books per year from 1928 to 1942. (
LouisLAmour.com)
Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis
(submitted by Emilie Smart)
First Line: "I am old now and have not much to fear from the anger of gods."
Interesting Fact: "C.S. Lewis was a member of a group known as 'The Inklings,' an informal collective of writers and intellectuals with his brother and J.R.R. Tolkien. Through conversations with these members, C.S. Lewis found himself re-embracing Christianity after becoming disillusioned with the faith in his youth." (
C.S. Lewis @ Biography.com)
The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin
(submitted by Susannah Day)
First Line: "There was a wall."
Interesting Fact: "LeGuin has chosen to make almost all of the characters in her books people of color-- a huge change from the other books of the science fiction/fantasy genre." (
http://writing-world.com/sf/leguin.shtml)
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling
(submitted by Donna Reed)
First Line: "Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of Number Four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much."
Interesting Fact: "#4 Privet Drive is located in Berkshire. The worst place in Muggledom is named after a small town in Gloucestershire. Rowling has visited such places as a child. The Dursley home can be found near Bracknell." (
www.empireonline.com)
Happy Holidays, and may all your reads be good ones!
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Happy Fall!
ICON: Art of the wine label, 641.22 C
It's flu season and this year is going to be a bad one. Luckily for us, it's takes some time for the bug to travel westward from the areas it's hitting most, like New York and Pennsylvania, where flu shots have sold out in many areas. CNN says we are actually on our way to a "flu epidemic" this year, with the virus showing up even earlier and with more severe symptoms than the past few years.
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