Caught you moving your lips!

Romance novelist Barbara Cartland was born on this day in 1901.

"If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves." -- Don Marquis.

The lost count of Monte Cristo

Alexandre Dumas pere was born July 24, 1802.


"Nobody has read everything of Dumas, not even Dumas himself." -- Anonymous.

What a character!

Sportswriter Heywood Hale Broun was born on this day in 1918. His famous remark is "Sports do not build character. They reveal it."


"I hate all sports as rabidly as a man who loves sports hates common sense." -- H. L. Mencken.

   Most of his life’s activity, it occurred to Sully, had consisted in just about equal parts of sports, reading and drinking. The rest had been sheer boredom. All of it had been boredom, to one degree or another, for that matter. Life was short only in retrospect; when it was happening it could take forever.  --  Chapter 22, The Misforgotten.

Aliteracy, fraternite, egalite

The first magazine in the U. S. was published on this day in 1741.

"I see no point in reading." -- Louis XIV of France (1638-1715).

He’d taken to reading early on, as a way of filling up time. But beyond that, a good reader and a good book could create a world unto itself, and shut out the real one. He’d been a good reader, however, only at times. For the most part it had been a mere habit, an unhealthy one at that it seemed to him now. All those ill-read books! He’d gone through thousands of them, most of them no more than a title now, if not utterly forgotten. What did he remember, say, of Moby Dick or Madame Bovary? “The heartless voids and immensities of the universe.” That was Melville, wasn’t it? Or was it Flaubert? The universe was as inhospitable to Emma as it was to Ishmael, equally cruel, capricious and senseless on land or at sea. That was what he’d carried away from books. The inscrutable pointlessness of life. The hostility it had in store for us. A hero or heroine, brimming with hope and good will, sets out in a novel to engage with life, prepared for a skirmish, for its inevitable bumps and bruises, and ends up crushed, demolished.


Life took you where it would, but who needed books to learn that?  --  Chapter 22, The Misforgotten

We'll drink to that

Prohibition was repealed on this date in 1933.


"Alcohol is the anaesthesia by which we endure the operation of life." -- George Bernard Shaw.

Most of his life’s activity, it occurred to Sully, had consisted in just about equal parts of sports, reading and drinking. The rest had been sheer boredom. All of it had been boredom, to one degree or another, for that matter. Life was short only in retrospect; when it was happening it could take forever...

Alcohol was a great sage and a great liar. Its way was toward life, and toward death. That is, it revealed life for what it was, a dream, and hastened one toward death, that dreamless sleep. The dream of life would give way to death, and death in turn, as a nullity abhorred by nature, would give way to new life, not a botched one this time but a fully realized one at last.  --  Chapter 22, The Misforgotten.