In the Margin
November 11, 2009

Common Reading

It sounds like a bad joke, except the punchline is really funny. A politician, a playboy, and a philosopher walk into a bookstore, and are asked to pick the book they remember most warmly from their childhoods.

 

If you ask me, there is no better evidence of the shared culture of books than the fact that when Newt Gingrich, Hugh Hefner, and Noam Chomsky were asked the question by the Little Auction That Could (more on that below), they expressed a fondness for the same characters and the same imaginative world. Go ahead, try to guess. We'll provide the answer on November 23, by revealing the other half of Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Mike Luckovich's illustration celebrating the unexpected communion of spirit exhibited by Misters Gingrich, Hefner, and Chomsky.

 

 

The Little Auction That Could is a celebrity book auction to benefit Florida's Hibiscus Children's Center, working with abused and neglected children on the Treasure Coast of Florida. The proceeds of the auction will build a fund to support and maintain the Center's library and educational center. The prominent figures who have contributed signed books to the auction include President Obama, Tiger Woods, Jimmy Buffett, Steve Martin, Jane Goodall, John McCain, Noam Chomsky, John Glenn, Jack Nicklaus, Kenneth Cole, Oprah Winfrey, J.K. Rowling, Maya Angelou, and Carl Hiassen, who will be hosting the gala auction event on November 20. To learn more about the auction -- and to bid on some of the signed books -- visit http://www.littleauctionthatcould.org/1.html.

 

To help the Hibiscus Cause with your Barnes & Noble purchases, shop here: www.bn.com/hibiscus.

 

And check this space on November 23 to discover what Gingrich, Hefner, and Chomsky have in common.

 

-JAMES MUSTICH

 

Daybook

February 9: Alice Walker was born on this day in 1944. Thirty years after her Pulitzer winner The Color Purple, Walker continues to publish in many genres. Her most recent book is The Chicken Chronicles, a memoir-meditation…

more »
Previously in Daybook
advertisement
The Long List
Books CDs, DVDs to know about now
Alice James

"The moral and philosophical questions that Henry wrote up as fiction and William as science," Jean Strouse writes of her subject's more famous brothers, "Alice simply lived." It took a biographer of sensitivity and brilliance to give that "simply" the profundity it deserves, and the resulting book, now reissued in the peerless NYRB Classics series, is one of the richest life stories you'll ever read.

Midnight in Austenland

The world of Jane Austen's fiction has long been an imaginative playground for writers and readers of a certain stripe. Shannon Hale's Austenland wittily took the next step, setting comic romance in a faux-Pemberly resort for the Darcy-smitten. Her latest returns for more Regency fun, but with a twist: does murder stalk Pembrook Park?

Humble Homes, Simple Shacks...

Childlike retreat? Arts and crafts challenge? Frugal and eco-friendly living option? The notion of the "tiny house" has the surprising potential to fire the imagination. In this exuberant volume of sketches, plans, and commentary, the artist Derek Diedricksen shares his infectious enthusiasm for the idea of the micro-mansion.