Readable, teachable news.
Tuesday, March 19, 2024
Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling served up a scary treat to her fans for Hallowe’en last week.
She published a new story chronicling the background of one of her most famous evil villains, Dolores Umbridge.
She published the story on her Harry Potter website, Pottermore.com and on a news website called Today.com.
One of Canada’s best-loved authors has won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The Nobel Prize is one of the most prestigious prizes an author can win. It comes with a $1-million cash award.
Alice Munro won the prize for her brilliant short stories.
Munro, 82, grew up in a small town in Ontario. Many of her stories are set in rural Ontario.
In making the announcement, Peter Englund, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, called Munro “master of the contemporary short story.”
Munro was surprised and delighted to find out she had won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
She told CBC News that, “I never thought I would win.”
Cairo, the capital city of Egypt, has a lot of traffic. Commuters often find themselves stuck in a traffic jam, unable to move.
One book store came up with an ingenious program to help the people who take taxis in the city. They call it, “The Taxi of Knowledge.”
Alef Books gives taxi drivers five free books, which they can place in the back seat of their cab.
Passengers can read a good book while they’re stuck in traffic.
The taxi driver gets to choose which books he wants. He can also trade them in whenever he wants, for different books.
There will soon be new costumes and facelifts for Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman and many other superheroes.
Collectively known as the Justice League, these comic book superheroes have been battling evil for decades.
Justice League is produced by DC Comics, and the company is facing increasing pressure from its biggest competitor, Marvel Comics.
That’s why they’re upgrading their best-loved comic heroes, starting Aug. 1.
Many of the heroes will take on a more youthful appearance, and about 50 will get new costumes.
Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling has finally revealed some of what Pottermore.com will have on it.
But it will be a bit difficult to understand exactly what will be on the new website until it’s fully up and running and that won’t be until October for most people.
One million lucky Harry Potter fans will be able to test the Pottermore site in a sneak preview starting on July 31, Harry’s birthday.
In a YouTube announcement and during a media conference in London, England, Rowling revealed that Pottermore will:
•Include more information and “back story” on some of the Harry Potter characters including Professor McGonagall (her childhood, ministry career, early heartbreak and her long friendship with Dumbledore), and how Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon met (at work, apparently).
•Include more than 18,000 words about Harry Potter and the characters, written by Rowling.
•Include a Pottermore shop where you can buy Harry Potter ebooks (digital books).
Or more accurately… what is author J. K. Rowling up to?
The answer is: a mysterious new website called Pottermore.
A few weeks before the launch of the final Harry Potter movie (Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Part 2), Rowling put up an intriguing website at www.pottermore.com.
She also began a Twitter account, twitter.com/pottermore, which has more than 75,000 followers.
It offers no clues as to what the website will be about.
It merely has the words “Pottermore” and “Coming soon…” with J. K. Rowling’s signature.
Jane Austen wrote some very famous novels in the early 1800s. Pride and Prejudice is perhaps her best-known book.
Although she published just six novels, she has millions of fans all over the world. They adore her novels about romance and society.
An extremely rare manuscript of an unfinished novel, written in Jane Austen’s own handwriting, is going to be sold in England.
There are 68 pages, part of a novel called The Watsons. Jane Austen never finished it, possibly because her father died. She wrote the pages in 1804, when she was 29 years old.
Austen’s first novel, Sense and Sensibility, was not published until 1811.
The Watsons pages are written in her neat and tiny handwriting with many edits in the margins. The manuscript was divided by Austen into 11 booklets.
Seven new Dr. Seuss stories have been discovered, and publisher Random House is publishing them in a new book called The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories by Dr. Seuss.
The stories were published in the 1950s in magazines, but they have never been put into book form before.
Charles D. Cohen discovered the stories. He is a dentist but his hobby is studying Dr. Seuss. He has the largest private collection of Seuss memorabilia (toys, clothing, books) in the world.
The new book will have seven stories in it, including Steak for Supper, about fantastic creatures who follow a boy home hoping for a steak dinner; The Bippolo Seed, in which a scheming feline leads an innocent duck to make a bad decision, and The Strange Shirt Spot, which was the inspiration for the bathrub-ring scene in The Cat in the Hat Comes Back.
The kids on the Shediac Capitals hockey team do all the usual stuff everyone else does: they gear up, put on skates and helmets, then they hit the ice.
During practices they do drills, learn new moves, shoot pucks, and field goals.
After practice, they go into the dressing room, unlace their skates and take off their gear, just like any other team.
But then the Shediac Capitals do something very different. They get out their books.
After every hockey practice, the grade-school aged kids who make up the Shediac Capitals in Moncton, NB have a reading circle.
Another Harry Potter adventure?
Might Harry Potter be called into service again, to keep the wizarding (and Muggle) world safe from the likes of Voldemort and his accomplices?
The answer is: “maybe.”
