You can see the Booker Prize shortlist and read excerpts from the books
here. It's the birthday of
F. Scott Fitzgerald. “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life,…[Gatsby had] …an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.”
Nick Carraway describing Gatsby, The Great Gatsby
XXVIII
From early on she loved romances,
they were her only food... and so
she fell in love with all the fancies
of Richardson and of Rousseau.
Her father, kindly, well-regarded,
but in an earlier age retarded,
could see no harm in books; himself
he never took one from the shelf,
thought them a pointless peccadillo;
and cared not what his daughter kept
by way of secret tome that slept
until the dawn beneath her pillow.
His wife, just like Tatyana, had
on Richardson gone raving mad.
from Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Translated by Charles Johnston
