Tagged: literature

What could be more epic than reading an epic poem in the way it would have been read more than two thousand years ago? How about reading it in English from beginning to end? The Western Michigan University World Languages department is doing a live marathon reading of Virgil’s The Aeneid on Friday.

The Little House on the Prairie books by Laura Ingalls Wilder have entertained kids for almost seventy five years, while teaching them a little about what life was like for pioneers during the late 1800s. While the books were published as fiction, most of the story was taken from Wilder’s own childhood. One of the biggest turning points in the books is when Laura’s older sister Mary goes blind after getting scarlet fever. But an article recently published in the American Academy of Pediatrics argues that scarlet fever did not cause Mary’s blindness at all. 

Wenger: Short stories have always been the heart of Science Fiction. Sci-Fi is a genre of ideas and even though some novels and series span galaxies, ideas can often be shared best in short form. Some stories you just can't get over, like Ray Bradbury's The Sound of Thunder, when, while hunting dinosaurs in the distant past, a hunter steps off the trail onto a butterfly and changes everything. Or the haunting last line of Arthur C. Clarke's The Nine Billion Names of God, when a computer has calculated all the possible names of God and the programmer looks up and "overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."