The good wizard from the "Lord of the Rings" popped up just after I posted the question on Twitter.
Gandalf is wise, compassionate and stubborn when he needs to be. Best of all, he knows how to vanish and reappear at will!
Steve said he’d like to be George Smiley from the terrific John le Carré novels and I like this choice! Smiley is brilliantly ordinary and unassuming, as a good spy should be.
Listen to how le Carré described him in the 1961 novel “Call for the Dead”:
“Short, fat and of a quiet disposition, he appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes, which hung about on his squat frame like skin on a shrunken toad.”
He’s the antithesis of James Bond, isn’t he?
Karen said she’d like to experience the life of Karana in “Island of the Blue Dolphins” because "she faced every challenge.” Naomi wrote that she could imagine herself as Dana Scully from the X Files. “She was smart, brave, tough and questioned everything.”
Indeed, Scully inspired Naomi into a career as a scientist. I love that!
Katie tweeted in to say she named her daughter for Anne Shirley, the extraordinary and spirited young girl in "Anne of Green Gables."
Remember Anne's imagination, resilience and bravery? What an honor to be named for her!
And writer N. West Moss, author of the memoir “Flesh & Blood,” tweeted that she finds meaning in the lives of two characters from literature:
First, Miss Havisham from Charles Dickens' novel “Great Expectations” because she reminds us "not to pause one’s life at its highest injustice.”
And West adds, “Joe Gargery for his unassuming love for Pip,” the narrator in “Great Expectations.”
Jen turned to the "Star Trek" character Miles O’Brien. “He’s a normal guy,” she said, “doing his best in an extraordinary universe. You don’t have to be 'special' to be important.”
Jen added: “Yes, fixing the warp core is critical but when those replicators go offline people lose their cool. Life is about the B storylines.”
Statistics about income inequality are stark. For example, two-thirds of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. But numbers are inadequate when trying to convey the desperation of living on the sharpest edge of poverty. Minnesota-raised new author Jakob Guanzon aims to paint a more gritty and throbbing story with his debut novel, “Abundance.”
In "An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us," Pulitzer prize-winning science journalist Ed Yong writes in a perfect balance of scientific rigor and personal awe as he invites readers to grasp something of how other animals experience the world. In the company of scientists with a laser vibrometer, a device that converts the treehopper vibrations into sounds audible to human ears, Yong gets to hear them in the wild and in the laboratory. He is "dumbfounded" by the "haunting, mesmerizing" sounds.
Jennifer Jubenville of the Bookstore at Fitger's in Duluth, says there’s nothing like a good thriller for a summer read. She recommends checking out Joshua Moehling’s debut, “And There He Kept Her.” In this thriller, personal tragedy leads a Minneapolis cop to seek a quieter life as sheriff’s deputy in small-town Minnesota, but he soon finds himself investigating a terrible crime at his new job.
