Monday, August 2, 2010

A Daily Dose of Literary Trivia

For some unknown reason, we've started tweeting a daily literary fact, somewhat abstrusely called Literary Fact of the Day.

For the non-tweeting out there, here's a run-down of what we chirped last week: 

  • Ezra Pound once claimed that he had never read any Russian literature.
  • Elizabeth Bishop refused to have her poetry published in anthologies of women's writing.
  • Hemingway's personal library had 7000+ volumes including (deliciously) THREE copies of FItzgerald's THE CRACK-UP. 
  • Faulkner wanted the text in The Sound in the Fury to be in four colors---one for each of the narrators.
  • In 1572, Cervantes was captured by Algerian pirates and enslaved for 5 years, before eventually being ransomed.
  • In 2010 dollars, Mr. Darcy's annual income would be about $600,000 per year.
  • Shakespeare's only son died in 1596 at the age of 11. His name.....wait for it.........Hamnet. (yup, with an n).
So if you're up for a quotidian morsel of bookish trifles, follow us @readingape or you can search the hashtag #lfotd. If you aren't aboard the Twitter train, never fear: we'll do a run-down from time to time of what you've missed.

8 comments:

  1. The Sound and the Fury would be much easier to teach if the publisher had gone with the "four color" idea!!

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  2. Absolutely love your blog! Now following you on Twitter. Thanks.

    Ingrid
    www.thebluebookcase.blogspot.com

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  3. That point about Elizabeth Bishop is utterly fascinating and I want to know the story behind it. Off to Wikipedia!

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  4. http://thenextbestbookblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/im-prolific.html

    Wanted to share a blog award with you. Keep up the great work.

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  5. I'm in agreement about the 4-color The Sound and the Fury.

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  6. 2many-
    Indeed. Indeed.

    Ingrid-
    Cheers

    Entish-
    She was pretty interesting. She didn't like being pigeon-holed...for any characteristic.

    TNBCC-
    Hey...well. Sheesh. Thanks.

    Andi-
    Maybe some enterprising publisher should do one. Copyright on it should run out here before too long...

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  7. Dear Ape, this is not intended to be a comment but rather an e-mail. I don't know how to reach you otherwise. Because I'm opinionated, I desperately want to hazard a guess about the 5-10 most misunderstood novels of all time. But since I don't know enough about world literature, I'd like you to hazard a guess for me, when time permits. Perhaps it can be a future blog entry.... Cheers, Kevin

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  8. Kevin-
    That's a pretty interesting list idea. I'll have a think about it and see what I come up with. I need to make this more accessible, but I can be reaching at readingape (at) gmail (dot) com.

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