Late Night With Jan Harayda — Free Online Excerpts From the Books of 23 Nobel Prize-Winners

Have you read so many novels by Mitch Albom and Stephenie Meyer that you’re losing the will to live? Go right now to the site for the Nobel Prize in literature, where you’ll find excerpts from the work of 23 writers of prose and 10 poets who have become laureates since 1926 (excluding Herta Müller, who won the 2009 prize today). The “Text Excerpts” section of the site is superbly organized, with all the selections listed and linked to on the same page, so you can start with any of them and, if doesn’t appeal to you, hit your back browser try another. If you like what you read, the Nobel site has more information about its author.

Good Free Reading Group Guides From the U.S. Government

On this site I’ve often faulted publishers’ reading group guides for their poor quality –- poor in part because they tend to pander to book-club members with loopy questions like: “The heroine of this novel is a one-eyed snake charmer whose parents were abducted by aliens. Have you ever known a one-eyed snake charmer whose parents were abducted by aliens?” Gee, I’ll have to think about that one! I might have known one-eyed snake charmer, but her parents got in the space ship voluntarily and technically weren’t abducted!  How about you?

So I was heartened to find that the U.S. Government has posted more than two dozen free reading group guides that are more objective and helpful. The guides come from The Big Read, a National Endowment for the Arts program intended to encourage reading, and most cover major American works of fiction for adults or children, such as My Antonia, The Great Gatsby, The Age of Innocence, The Call of the Wild, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. But a couple deal with books by authors from other countries — Naguib Mahfouz’s The Thief and the Dogs and Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich – and the NEA plans soon to post companions to the poetry of Emily Dickinson and others.

You can download the guides for free at the site for The Big Read. And some libraries can get printed versions and CDs with more information at no cost. (I learned about all of this when I found a stack of free reader’s guides and companion disks for To Kill a Mockingbird at a small-town library giving them away to patrons.) Along with warhorses such as The Grapes of Wrath, The Big Read guides deal with a couple gems that are less well known, including Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl.

www.janiceharayda.com

‘Win This Book’ Returns to One-Minute Book Reviews in 2009 – Happy Holidays

A while back, I ran contests that gave you varied ways to win books reviewed on this site, which I stopped mainly because I don’t drive and had to make an extra trip to the post office for them. (I know, I know: Why is a trip to the post office to mail a book such a big deal? Tell them, my fellow New Jerseyans.) As another year ends, I’ve decided I’m old enough to figure out how to get to the post office even if NJ Transit doesn’t cooperate, so I’m bringing back the contests in 2009.

A thousand thanks to all of you for visiting One-Minute Book Reviews in 2008. It’s a joy to read your comments.

Happy Holidays!

Jan

Listen to Thanksgiving Hymns and Others for Free at Cyber Hymnal — Downloadable for Free, Too, If They’re Out of Copyright

Further update at 7:45 p.m. Dec. 1: The Cyber Hymnal site is back up. I just listened to the Doxology and “The Snow Lay on the Ground,” the carol often used as an anthem (the first I remember singing with youth choir at my childhood church). But I’m leaving up the Nov. 29 update because you may want to use Hymn Site as a back-up if Cyber Hymnal goes down again. Jan

Update at 5:25 p.m. Nov. 29: The Cyber Hymnal site seems to have crashed — let’s hope temporarily — since I posted this. The link worked without problems for days. But at this writing you can’t reach Cyber Hymnal either from here or the link on Google. Until the site is up again, you can hear the music and find the words to hymns at HymnSite www.hymnsite.com. HymnSite isn’t as easy to search as Cyber Hymnal and may have fewer hymns, but has many of the same elements. Jan

Update, Nov. 2010: Cyber Hymnal is now NetHymnal, and the links in this post have been changed to reflect it.

Today I was looking for facts to add to a quote of the day about a Thanksgiving hymn and found a site called NetHymnal that lets you listen for free to the music of more than hymns and Gospel songs.  NetHymnal also has the words and background of tunes, pictures of authors or composers, a few musical scores and more. It offers 29 hymns by J. S. Bach alone, including such chart-busters as “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” and “Von Himmel Hoch.” The site is just what its name implies — the online equivalent of a hymnal you might find slotted into a pew except that it lets you listen to the music instead of reading the scores. And you can download for free anything that’s out of copyright.

So this is the place to go if you’d like to hear the Thanksgiving hymns “Now Thank We All Our God,” “For the Beauty of the Earth” and “We Gather Together” (the only one of the three that’s non-Trinitarian in all verses). Cyber Hymnal also lets you listen to Christmas carols and patriotic songs such as “O Canada,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “Eternal Father, Strong to Save” (the Navy Hymn). And if you’re getting married in a church soon, you can hear any hymn that could be played at your wedding. Be sure to listen to the traditional — and best — version of the classic wedding hymn “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling” on Cyber Hymnal before somebody talks you into the alternate setting that has become popular without my consent. (Are you going to invite me to the wedding?)

If you don’t care for Thanksgiving hymns but want to hear to some of the most stirring music ever written, use the title search tool on Nethymnal to look for “Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee” (the Ode to Joy from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony), “Thine Be the Glory” (“See, the Conqu’ring Hero Comes” from Handel’s Judas Maccabeus) and “Be Still, My Soul” (“The Song of Peace” from Sibelius’s Finlandia). Like the Colorado Rockies, that quote of the day that I planned to post will have to wait till next year, because I’m off to Cyber Hymnal to listen Beethoven’s “The Heavn’s Resoundeth” (“The Heavens Are Telling”), nearly as glorious as the “Ode to Joy.”

The picture above from the old Cyber Hymnal shows Catherine Winkworth (1827-78), who translated “Now Thank We All Our God” (“Nun Danket”) from the German.

(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Novelists Talk About Their Books on Free DVDs for Reading Groups

Ouch! Since I wrote this, the hard drive on my Mac laptop has apparently crashed. I hope to get it fixed in the next day or two. In the meantime, I’ll try to post on computers at a library, where I am now, but may be slow to respond to comments. Thanks for your patience. Jan

Tonight I was going to write a post about Kilt Dead (Kensington, $22), the first mystery in Kaitlyn Dunnett‘s new Scottish-themed series set in Maine www.kaitlyndunnett.com. But you’ll have to wait a day or two for that one, because I decided instead to go into Manhattan for a launch party for National Reading Group Month, sponsored by the Women’s National Book Association www.wnba-books.org and www.wnba-nyc.org.

At the celebration I learned about something reading groups may want to check out: Random House is giving away to book clubs on a while-supplies-last basis three DVDs, each of which has a different female author talking about her books: Lorna Landvik (Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons), Adriana Trigiani (Home to Big Stone Gap) and Fannie Flagg (Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven). I haven’t read any of these books, but if you have and love them, you can request a DVD for your club at www.thereaderscircle.com.

Would that Random House would do a DVD for Katha Pollitt! Her new essay collection Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories is ideal for book group members who liked the bestseller from the company’s Knopf imprint, Nora Ephron‘s I Feel About My Neck. A review of and reading group guide to Pollitt’s book appeared on this site on Oct. 16 www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2007/10/16/.

(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.