Carpe Libra

Austen ‘too ugly’ for book cover 
 
The book cover shows Austen without her night-cap
Novelist Jane Austen has been given a makeover for the cover of a book about her life after publishers decided an original image of her was unattractive.
“She was not much of a looker,” said Helen Trayler, managing director of publisher Wordsworth Editions.
Publishers [...]

Director … Stanley Kubrick
Peter Sellers … Group Captain Lionel Mandrake/President Merkin Muffley/Dr. Strangelove
George C. Scott …  Gen. ‘Buck’ Turgidson
Sterling Hayden …  Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper
Keenan Wynn …  Col. ‘Bat’ Guano
Slim Pickens …  Maj. T.J. ‘King’ Kong
Peter Bull …  Russian Ambassador Alexi de Sadesky
James Earl Jones …  Lt. Lothar Zogg
Plot in a Nutshell
A comedy about an [...]

Due to some scheduling conflicts, this weekly feature won’t be quite so weekly this month.  I’ll be doing a double feature for the next couple installments.  I don’t know if that means they’ll be twice as interesting or twice as tedious.  But they will be twice as long.
On March 20, 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle [...]

I guess this isn’t too much of a surprise. How about you?

What Kind of Reader Are You? 
Your Result: Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm

You’re probably in the final stages of a Ph.D. or otherwise finding a way to make your living out of reading. You are one of the literati. Other people’s grammatical mistakes make you insane.

Book Snob

Dedicated Reader

Literate [...]

If this was a drinking group, I’d say we should all raise a mug to this week in Carp 500 history.  Read on to see why.
On March 11, 1818, Mary Shelley’s FrankenSTEIN was published.
March 14, 1879: EinSTEIN was born.  His captivating Relativity: The Special and General Theory didn’t quite make the list, but it is summarized [...]

Director …. Alfred Hitchcock
James Stewart …. L. B. ‘Jeff’ Jeffries
Grace Kelly …. Lisa Carol Fremont
Wendell Corey …. Lt. Thomas J. Doyle
Thelma Ritter …. Stella
Raymond Burr …. Lars Thorwald
Judith Evelyn …. Miss Lonelyheart
Ross Bagdasarian …. Songwriter
Georgine Darcy …. Miss Torso (the ballet dancer)
Irene Winston …. Mrs. Anna Thorwald
Plot in a Nutshell
An invalid, confined to his apartment, [...]

I planned on starting with that lame old joke about the date Washington (Carp 500 author) sent his troops against the British, but there was already enough happening on March 4th (get it??) that I don’t have to resort to such awful humor. 
On March 4th, 1837, Chicago was incorporated.  You can mark the occasion by reading Carl [...]

Tip of the Day: On Dailylit.com you can sign up to receive daily portions of classics. For instance, David Copperfield will be sent to you in 447 parts… but just think of it – in a year and a month you'll have finished it with hardly any pain at all! Rene Descartes' Discours de la [...]

For March’s kid’s book, I picked a cool little board book named, “A Little Bit of Soul Food” written by Amy Wilson Sanger. The simple rhyming text describes a variety of delicious traditional “soul food”. Being raised in the south, this is what I grew up on and it reminds me a lot [...]

This was a very active week in history for the Carp 500, and including Leap Year events this is the longest week of the year.  There was so much to choose from, I had to delete a few items.  Eight days this week was not enough to… I was going to try a clever parody of [...]