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The Reader’s Notebook
Weekdays (T-TH) at 9:06 a.m., 12:20 p.m. and 5:44 p.m.

“The Reader’s Notebook” is a daily radio feature using general interest pieces, often of literary or historic significance. Topics will also include science, technology, philosophy, folklore and the arts.

The series is written and hosted by J. D. Reeder, a retired educator, historian, avid reader and regular writer, director, and performer with the Morehead Theatre Guild.

The segments air weekdays (M-TH) at 9:06 a.m., 12:20 p.m. and 5:44 p.m. Each segment will include vignettes about writers, artists and other noteworthy people whose birthdays or other significant events coincide with the date of the program. 

Occasionally, word and phrase origins will be explored, often with a Kentucky connection or include poems and excerpts from other writings associated with the subject of the day.  Each episode will conclude with the phrase: “Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year,” a quotation from noted American poet and essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Theme music for "The Reader's Notebook" provided by Todd Kozikowski ("Shadows of the Moon"/1997).

Podcast Link

  • English novelist, playwright, and short-story writer whose work is characterized by a clear unadorned style, cosmopolitan settings, and a shrewd understanding of human nature.
  • Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann was a German Romantic author of fantasy and Gothic horror, a jurist, composer, music critic and artist. His stories form the basis of Jacques Offenbach's opera The Tales of Hoffmann, in which Hoffmann appears as the hero.
  • Marie-Henri Beyle, better known by his pen name Stendhal, was a 19th-century French writer. Best known for the novels Le Rouge et le Noir and La Chartreuse de Parme, he is highly regarded for the acute analysis of his characters' psychology and considered one of the early and foremost practitioners of realism.
  • Alan Alexander Milne was an English writer best known for his books about the teddy bear Winnie-the-Pooh, as well as for children's poetry. Milne was primarily a playwright before the huge success of Winnie-the-Pooh overshadowed all his previous work.
  • Mack Sennett was a Canadian-American producer, director, actor, and studio head who was known as the "King of Comedy" during his career. Born in Danville, Quebec, in 1880, he started in films in the Biograph Company of New York City, and later opened Keystone Studios in Edendale, California in 1912.
  • Robert William Service was a British-Canadian poet and writer, often called "the Bard of the Yukon". Born in Lancashire of Scottish descent, he was a bank clerk by trade, but spent long periods travelling in the west in the United States and Canada, often in poverty.
  • Jonathan Swift (born November 30, 1667, Dublin, Ireland—died October 19, 1745, Dublin) Anglo-Irish author, who was the foremost prose satirist in the English language. Besides the celebrated novel Gulliver’s Travels (1726), he wrote such shorter works as A Tale of a Tub (1704) and “A Modest Proposal” (1729).
  • Wendell Phillips was an American abolitionist, advocate for Native Americans, orator, and attorney. According to George Lewis Ruffin, a Black attorney, Phillips was seen by many Blacks as "the one white American wholly color-blind and free from race prejudice".
  • William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his life, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age.
  • Thanksgiving Day, annual national holiday in the United States and Canada celebrating the harvest and other blessings of the past year.