Happy Birthday Fyodor Dostoevsky!

To live without hope is to cease to live. 

– Fyodor Dostoevsky

Ever since we started celebrating the birthdays of beloved authors like Roald Dahl, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Shel Silverstein and T. S. Eliot in my "Famous Author Birthday" series, I've been waiting for November 11. Today, we get to celebrate the birthday of one of my all time favourite authors – Fyodor Dostoevsky. Please join me in wishing him a very С Днем Рождения (happy birthday in Russian)!

Fyodor Dostoevsky (November 11, 1821 – 9 February, 1881) was a Russian author, essayist and philosopher. His most famous works include Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Notes from Underground and The Brothers Karamazov, all of which are amongst some of my favourite books.

Dostoevsky, along with Leo Tolstoy, is considered one of the greatest authors of the Golden Age of Russian literature. His books have been translated into more than 170 languages! Not only that, he has influenced a lot – and I mean a lot – of writers, philosophers, scientists and psychologists. Albert Einstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, Anton Chekhov, Herman Hesse, Knut Hamsun, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud and Kurt Vonnegut (who incidentally shares the same birthday – happy birthday Kurt Vonnegut!) are all fans of his work!

Dostoevsky's notes for Chapter 5 of The Brothers Karamazov

Dostoevsky's novels are often very complex, and his characters very dark. He joined a lot of different points of views and voices together to explore many deep themes including religion, guilt, dreams, emotions, visions and human nature. To give an example, the picture to the left is his notes for one chapter of The Brothers Karamzov. His works encompass so many ideas and themes that I will leave it up to him to do the explaining himself with a quote.

Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.

Dostoevsky was the reason I fell in love with Russian literature, and I hope that one day you, my students, will get the chance to read at least one of his books and feel for yourself what a mind-blowing experience it really is! To conclude, here is some advice from the very wise man himself:

Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to live.

– The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky

P.S. To find out more about our Kurt Vonnegut, our other birthday boy, the Huffington Post wrote a wonderful post about what Vonnegut can teach us about life.

Join the Universe in Wishing Carl Sagan a Big Bang of a Birthday!

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This weekend we celebrate the birthday of beloved American astronomer, astrophysicist and cosmologist Carl Sagan on November 9. Sagan was born in 1934 and died in 1996.

Carl Sagan is famous for contributing to people's understanding of the cosmos – the universe – as a whole. He is the author of the science book and TV series Cosmos. Cosmos covered many scientific topics such as the origin of life and our place in the Universe. He also wrote the novel Contact, which was made into a movie in 1997.

Because Carl Sagan was able to communicate complex ideas very easily, he helped people understand our place, as humans, in the universe. He taught us how small the Earth is compared to the Universe but at the same time emphasized the value and importance of the human race. Sagan's work helped to discover the high surface temperatures on Venus, the second planet from the sun. His research also deals with the possibilities of extraterrestrial life (aliens!).

In honour of his birthday, here, from the 11th episode of Cosmos, is a quote from Sagan about the magic of books:

What an astonishing thing a book is. It is a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

Halloween Roundup: Mystery, Suspense & All Things Spooktacular!

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Hehehe, Halloween has arrived! For the past two weeks, we have been working on an array of Halloween-related activities, and now that the actual day is here, we can finally take a look back at some of the most spine-chilling, hair-raising and blood-curdling things that everyone has been doing this past week, which also happened to be midterms week. Boo! (Pun intended).

Alice has finally published to her blog! Her second blog post is her own version of George's Marvellous Medicine, complete with doses of wine, human eyes, stinky socks and creepy crawlies. If you are thinking of cooking up a witch's brew this Halloween, click here for instructions on how you can remake Alice's Fantastic Medicine*.

Coco has written a spooky story about a sweet old lady who really was not so sweet...

Sandy, who loves scary stories, has started working on her own story about a group of teenage computer geniuses who hack for the state. One day when our protagonist was on a covert hacking mission, a mysterious message appears on the screen...

Selina and I spent some time last week reading some Edgar Allan Poe, the master of mystery and macabre and the inventor of detective fiction. After we explored themes of madness and guilt in The Tell-Tale Heart, we watched this excellently creepy UPA animation of the story.

On the note of detective fiction, Selina and I also started reading something a little more challenging but very, very exciting and mysterious and intelligent and wonderful and all the rest (Can you tell I'm a big fan?) – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's tales of the eccentric yet fantastic consulting detective who lives on 221B Baker Street that is, none other than Sherlock Holmes himself. After reading The Red-Headed League, Selina has written her thoughts up in a post. Our next mystery will be A Study in Scarlet, as well as other Sherlock Holmes short stories. In the mean time, we have begun watching Sherlock, the BBC's wonderful modern adaptation of the stories and one of my favourite TV shows.

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Finally, we have been collectively working on a tale of mystery and suspense titled Rosebud. I did borrow the word from Citizen Kane but our story turned out quite differently, and thanks to the weird inner workings of the minds of everyone (myself included), much, much more scary. It is still a work-in-progress so keep an eyeball out for how the mystery unravels...

*We are in no way responsible for any injuries that may occur as a result of consuming the fantastic medicine. We also will not be able to help people clean up any vomit (or dead bodies).

Happy Birthday William Faulkner & Shel Silverstein!

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There's no shortage of famous author birthdays this week. Besides F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was born on September 23, September 25 is the birthday of American authors William Faulkner and Shel Silverstein.

Faulkner, who was born in 1897, won a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949 for his "powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel" and is most famous for the books The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. 

Like Fitzgerald, Faulkner also had a lot to say about writing. Here are some of the best quotes about how to be a writer from an article published in the Huffington Post for his birthday. 

The best writers are insatiable 

Ninety-nine percent talent... ninety-nine percent discipline... ninety-nine percent work. He must never be satisfied with what he does. It never is as good as it can be done. Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

A writer must be a reader 

Read, read, read. Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window. 

Shel Silverstein, who you may also know as Uncle Shelby, was also born on September 25, but in 1930. To celebrate Shel Silverstein's birthday, here is a video of him narrating his most famous book, The Giving Tree, in 1973.

Roald Dahl's Birthday & Life Lessons From His Novels

Last Friday (September 13) was the birthday of one of my and I know many of your all time favourite authors – Roald Dahl. He would have turned 97!

The Huffington Post published a piece wishing him a happy birthday with a list of eleven things that we can learn from his novels. Here are some highlights, all courtesy of the Huffington Post.

It's okay to be different

Many of Roald Dahl's protagonists are very different from the people around them. But characters like Matilda, Willy Wonka and James from James and the Giant Peach show us that our differences are what make us human – and quite extraordinary! Be true to yourself. Do what you love, love what you do, and you will find true happiness and success!

Reading is fundamentally important, and it can change your life

Matilda loves books because they transported her to all sorts of exciting new places and introduced her to all sorts of weird and wonderful people. Books are incredibly powerful, and they will change your life. To quote Dr. Seuss, "Oh, the place you'll go!"

It's important to be independent

While our families are probably all a lot nicer than Matilda's, it is important to know that there will be times when people will not be there to support us. Sometimes, people will let you down. While this can be heartbreaking, it teaches us that we need have the ability to be okay with doing things (and having fun!) alone.

Appearances can be deceiving

The BFG is a big and friendly giant, while the witches are "demons in human form." These novels warn us against judging a book by its cover, teaching us to look at other's characters rather than their appearances.

You can accomplish anything if you put your mind to it 

Look at the marvellous things that Roald Dahl's characters achieve in his novels! Roald Dahl would have wanted us to know that with determination, anything is possible. Just like my favourite actress Audrey Hepburn said, "Nothing is impossible, the word itself says I'm possible!"

Sometimes, dreams do come true

Charlie never thought in a million years he would have a chance to win a golden ticket and Matilda never thought she would get away from her horrid family. Luckily – spoiler alert – their dreams come true! Don't stop believing!

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What's your favourite Roald Dahl book? 

The Treasure of Kassy C.

On Tuesday, Selina and I read Walter Dean Myers' short story called The Treasure of Lemon Brown. Selina then wrote a wonderful blog post about what she learnt from the story, going onto discuss her own treasures – her books – and how special they are to her.

Just like Lemon Brown says, "Every man got a treasure." But not every man is a pirate with an old wooden treasure chest overbrimming with all the stolen riches in the world. Our treasures are not things that have monetary value but sentimental value. Indeed, even William Shakespeare, the greatest writer in the English language, believed so; one of the most famous quotes from his play The Merchant of Venice is "All that glitters is not gold."

Like Selina, my treasure also has to do with books. However, it is a very specific book – my well-worn copy of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, which is my all-time favourite novel. My mum bought my copy for me from Whitcoulls, a bookstore in New Zealand. This book has travelled with me everywhere – from New Zealand to Taiwan to Los Angeles.

Others may think that my copy of Pride and Prejudice is outdated and insignificant, and indeed, there are many much nicer hardcover versions out there. But little do they know that the creases on the spine correspond directly with my favourite pages in the book, meaning if you were to pick up my book, it will almost always open to the part I love best. To me, these bends and cracks are not the signs of deterioration; they are the marks of love.

I once thought I lost the book when we moved from one city to another. I scoured the house and ransacked through dozens of boxes in search of the book, but all to no avail. I was so upset that my parents conceded and bought me a new and much nicer copy. It just didn't feel the same though. This wasn't the copy that I had held in my hands the first time I read it and fell in love with Mr. Darcy, and it certainly wasn't the copy I proudly carried everywhere as I declared I wanted to be just like its heroine, Lizzie Bennett.

Luckily, I did end up finding my old copy, and now I have two copies of Pride and Prejudice. Even though the stories are exactly the same, you can guess which copy I love more.

What is your treasure and why is it valuable to you?