Books live. Books endure and prevail. Books are humanity in print. Books are the diary of the human race. As we grow older, we become all the ages we once were. And by exploring books, we become all that we have read.

Reading gives us some place to go when we have to stay where we are, Mason Cooley writes. His insight is a brief echo of Emily Dickinsons 1873 poem:

There is no Frigate like a BookTo take us Lands away Nor any Coursers like a PageOf prancing Poetry

This Traverse may the poorest takeWithout oppress of Toll How frugal is the ChariotThat bears a Human soul.

The San Diego Union-Tribune Festival of Books, with a new home at USD, will return on Saturday, Aug. 20, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. No surprise there, as San Diego is routinely ranked by Amazon among the nations Most Well-Read Cities. Ill be signing my books and would love to meet you there.

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What do you get when you cross a gorilla with a clay worker? You end up with a Hairy Potter. We recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of the publication of the first Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone, by British author J.K. Rowling.

Unemployed and living on state benefits, single mother Rowling wrote much of her first novel sitting in local Edinburgh cafes or banging away on a manual typewriter in her sisters home. Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone was rejected by 12 publishers before being accepted by Bloomsbury Publishing and only then because the CEOs 8-year-old daughter insisted on it. By the time she had completed six of the seven books in her projected series, Rowling was named the greatest living British writer and she certainly has become by far the richest.

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Lewis Carroll published his Through the Looking-Glass fantasy novel on Dec. 27, 1871, but the year was listed as 1872, so we celebrate its sesquicentennial. In this sequel to Alices Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Alice again enters a fantastical world, this time by climbing through a mirror.

Carroll showed a particular aptitude for conjuring up blend words by merging two words and paring parts of one or both. He called these inventions portmanteau words because he loved to scrunch two words into one as clothes are crammed into a portmanteau, or traveling bag. The most famous example of Lewis Carrolls facile gift for blending is his Jabberwocky poem, in Through the Looking-Glass. This most familiar of all nonsense verses begins:

Twas brillig, and the slithy tovesDid gyre and gimble in the wabe;All mimsy were the borogoves,And the mome raths outgrabe.

When Alice asks Humpty Dumpty to explain the word slithy, he answers: Well slithy means lithe and slimy. You see, its like a portmanteau there are two meanings packed into one word. The egghead (soon to be an omelet) later interprets mimsy: Well, then, mimsy is flimsy and miserable (theres another portmanteau for you). Two words that appear later in Jabberwocky have become enshrined in English dictionaries chortle (chuckle + snort) and galumph (gallop + triumph):

When we today eat Frogurt, quaff Cranapple juice and Fruitopia, have brunch (breakfast + lunch), take a staycation (stay + vacation) rather than stay at a motel (motor + hotel), ride our moped (motor + pedal), bemoan the smog (smoke + fog), learn from webinars (web +seminars), play Fictionary (fiction + dictionary), read Freakonomics (freak + economics), write to a frenemy (friend + enemy), save money with groupons (group + coupons), get hammered by stagflation (stagnant + inflation), and avoid covidiots (COVID + idiots), we are imbibing Lewis Carrolls ginormous (giant+enormous) delight in portmanteau words.

Recently, 16-year-old Rohana Khattal, of Islamabad, Pakistan, invented the portmanteau word oblivionaire to describe a billionaire who is oblivious to inequality. Oblivionaire won the Learning Networks Invent a Word Challenge.

The rest is here:
The U-Ts Festival of Books is back live and online - The San Diego Union-Tribune