How to choose a book | LitBash 47

Are you overwhelmed by bookstore shelves that are brimming with books? Don't know which book to pick? Use lists, such as one with writers who were...

Born this week:

Albert Camus, France
"A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously."

William Wharton, Germany

Bram Stoker, UK
"I am Dracula, and I bid you welcome."

Margaret Mitchell, USA

Peter Weiss, Germany
"I could buy myself paper, a pen, a pencil and a brush and could create pictures whenever and wherever I wanted. ... That evening, in the spring of 1947, on the embankment of the Seine in Paris, at the age of thirty, I saw that it was possible to live and work in the world, and that I could participate in the exchange of ideas that was taking place all around, bound to no country."

Peer Hultberg, Denmark

Ivan Turgenev, Russia

Imre Kertesz, Hungary
"If one takes the path of success, then one ends up either successful or unsuccessful, there is no third alternative."

Carl Sagan, USA
"Humans — who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals — have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain."

Friedrich von Schiller, Germany
"Did you think the lion was sleeping because he didn't roar?"

Max Mell, Austria

Arnold Zweig, Germany

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Russia
"Granted I am a babbler, a harmless vexatious babbler, like all of us. But what is to be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is babble, that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?"

Kurt Vonnegut, USA
"Well, I've worried some about, you know, why write books ... why are we teaching people to write books when presidents and senators do not read them, and generals do not read them. And it's been the university experience that taught me that there is a very good reason, that you catch people before they become generals and presidents and so forth and you poison their minds with ... humanity, and however you want to poison their minds, it's presumably to encourage them to make a better world."

Carlos Fuentes, Mexico
"What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others."

Michael Ende, Germany
"Time is Life."

Robert Louis Stevenson, UK
"In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye."

Died this week:

Carl Erik Soya, Denmark

Ken Kesey, USA
"The job of the writer is to kiss no ass, no matter how big and holy and white and tempting and powerful."

Emmuska Orczy, Hungary / UK
"I have so often been asked the question: "But how did you come to think of The Scarlet Pimpernel?" And my answer has always been: "It was God's will that I should."

Guido Piovene, Italy

Elemir Bourges, France