BS: Your Favorite Authors

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: JennyO
Date: 18 Dec 02 - 07:04 AM

Ah yes, I'd forgotten about Roald Dahl.Love his sense of the bizarre and unexpected. I wish I could write like him!

Also Douglas Adams
    Tolkien
    J.K. Rowling
    Gary Zukav

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: Cluin
Date: 18 Dec 02 - 01:18 PM

Norman Maclean
Cormac McCarthy (for some reason makes me feel like I'm reading Hemingway again)
John Steinbeck (slightly surprised that the guy who wrote Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men had me laughing all the way through Cannery Row)

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: Kim C
Date: 18 Dec 02 - 01:35 PM

In no particular order (because it changes):

Charles Dickens
Victor Hugo
Howard Bahr

I have talked about Howard a fair bit in the threads at one time or other. He wrote two Civil War novels, The Black Flower and The Year of Jubilo. Both are excellent.

Some of you know that I wrote a song inspired by his novel The Black Flower. Mister and I have since met Howard, and we have become fast friends. He is a really swell guy, loves the old songs, and plays the fiddle himself.

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: Fran
Date: 18 Dec 02 - 01:48 PM

J K Rowling
Roald Dahl
Bodie Thoene
Georgette Heyer

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: TIA
Date: 18 Dec 02 - 02:02 PM

Douglas Adams
Richard Feynman
Stephen J. Gould
Dr. Seuss
Robert Parker
Kurt Vonnegut
James Trefil
LLoyd Alexander

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: Amos
Date: 18 Dec 02 - 02:35 PM

Robert Heinlein has patrimonial claims on fifty per cent of the good scifi ever written, and deserves more credit than he's gotten for his anthropological observations and his studies of the mating rituals and defense behavbiors of homo sapiens sapientes.

That said, I think you guys have said it all, except I didn't see Poisonwood Bible authoress Barbara Kingsolver on the list, and she is a fo' shuah don't miss.

A

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: TIA
Date: 18 Dec 02 - 03:15 PM

Right on about Heinlen, but the best SciFi book ever was A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. Actually could be called a philosophy and/or religion (or anthropology?) book as well.

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: GUEST,lola
Date: 18 Dec 02 - 03:38 PM

KATE ATKINSON!!!!
has anybody read "Behind the Scenes at the Museum"?
Nancy Willard
Tom Robbins
Joyce *sigh* -class by himself
Roddy Doyle, and yes, there is a film for every portion of the Barrytown trilogy, though i myself prefer "The Woman Who Walked Into Doors"
and Howard Pyle for his four-and-twenty martvelous tales, being one for each hour of the day

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: Cluin
Date: 18 Dec 02 - 03:48 PM

They really filmed "The Van"? How did I miss it?

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: alanabit
Date: 18 Dec 02 - 04:53 PM

I could go on a bit here, but I should start by saying that Shakespeare semed to know more about human beings past, present and future than anyone else I have ever read. I'll add:
    Mark Twain
    Oscar Wilde
    W.Somerset Maugham
    C.S.Forester
    Harper Lee
    Rudyard Kipling
    Douglas Adams
    another twenty tomorrow...

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: Amergin
Date: 18 Dec 02 - 05:33 PM

tim pat coogan...

Jean Markale...

tolkien...

douglas adams...

harry turtledove

morgan llewyllyn (sp?)

jack london

woody guthrie

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: Amergin
Date: 18 Dec 02 - 05:34 PM

forgot to add patrick macgill...

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: RangerSteve
Date: 18 Dec 02 - 05:40 PM

I forgot: O. Henry and Saki (H.H. Munro). How come no Brits mentioned him? Also, HG Wells, Jules Verne, H. Ryder Haggard.

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: Thomas the Rhymer
Date: 18 Dec 02 - 06:01 PM

*Tolstoy*
Alasdair Grey
Robert Burns
James Kelman
Victor Hugo
A S Byatt
Doris Lessing
Charles Dickens
Charles Dodson
Samuel Clemmens
Sholokov
Mercedes Lackey
Henry David Thoreau
John Muir
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Fyodor Dostoyevesky
Thomas Hardy
Mary Ann Evans
Dylan Thomas
James Kelman
Tom Robbins
George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff
Maddam Blavatsky
Krishnamurti
Alice A Bailey

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: Uncle_DaveO
Date: 18 Dec 02 - 06:13 PM

Tolkien, Tolkien, Tolkien, and Tolkien! I count four different fields of writing, although some of them are related.

1. Tolkien, for Lord of the Rings and to a lesser extent, The Hobbit.
2. Tolkien, for The Silmarillion and (with posthumous editing by his son) The Book of Lost Tales, Unfinished Tales and another whose name I don't recall at the moment.
3. Tolkien, for his fairy stories (not all for children, by any means).
4. Tolkien, for his translations of Middle English poetry, such as Pearl, Sir Lancelot and the Green Knight and more.

Dave Oesterreich

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: Amergin
Date: 18 Dec 02 - 06:14 PM

i thought that was sir gawain and the green knight....

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: Micca
Date: 18 Dec 02 - 07:07 PM

Bat Godess, I Know now why I like you!!!!
Arthur Upfield and Thorne Smith!!!!!!
Mine include,(both the above)
Kipling
Heinlein,
Fred Hoyle
Edmund Cooper,
Susan Cooper,
Eric Frank Russel
Frederic Brown,
Richard Matheson
Asimov,
Feynman
Spike Milligan,
Guy Bellamy
Robert Graves
etc. etc.

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: KateG
Date: 18 Dec 02 - 07:10 PM

Ohh, where to start...

In no particular order, other than free association

J.R.R. Tolkien
Jane Austin
Lois McMaster Bujold
Ursula K LeGuin
C J Cherryh
Dorothy Sayers
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (non fiction, social history)
Icelandic Sagas, any of them
Elizabeth Peters
Saki (H.H. Monroe)
Charles Dickens
Banjamin Franklin (his autobiography is a hoot)
Nancy Mitford

But not Heinlein. I enjoyed his stories as a pre-adolescent, but then I grew up and realized that his view of women was antediluvian. In the early stories they are interlopers or should stay home and tend the kids (Podkayne of Mars for example); in the late ones they become sex toys for dirty old men.

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: Amos
Date: 18 Dec 02 - 07:13 PM

Beg to differ, there, KateG -- I believe almost all the sexual activity in Heinlein's stuff is completely consensual and mutually celebratory. I don't think that qualifies as "toys".

A

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: Poddy
Date: 18 Dec 02 - 08:33 PM

Also, you have to keep in mind that although he (Heinlein) did often portray women as only good for tending to the home and children in his early stuff, he was writing in the 1940s and 1950s. Not that that justifies it, just makes me not mind it so much. And Poddy, even if she was a bit wimpy and girly, was pretty feisty! And while his women did enjoy sex, I don't think they were toys either. Friday, Maureen, the twins...pretty much everyone gave as good as they got. The men were sex objects too.

My boyfriend is surprised no one's mentioned Aldous Huxley, so I'll add him to my list.

Does anyone care to make a distinction between "favorite" authors and "authors that I really really like and think everyone should read"? Are they synonomous?

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: Cluin
Date: 18 Dec 02 - 11:16 PM

Didn't notice Melville listed above anywhere.

Anyone else find Moby Dick a real slog? Been working on getting through that one for years. Read a couple of chapters then put it away for about 6 months. Jeez, how many pages did he spend on the symbolism of the colour white? Great story, but not "light" reading, by any stretch.

Heavier even than Tolstoy... Nikolai, I mean. "The Coming of the King". I was so busy trying to figure out who was who in that one, I could barely follow the story. Did he ever write any more books in that series?

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: DonMeixner
Date: 18 Dec 02 - 11:40 PM

All my faves have been mentioned but I don't recall seeing

Louis L'Amour

Dick Francis

Or

H. Beam Piper

Don

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: alanabit
Date: 19 Dec 02 - 02:16 AM

Good point Don. I found it hard work getting past the first page. However, why has nobody mentioned the fact that Charles Dickens is unreadable and that Virginia Woolf would not be worth reading even if if was readable prose?

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: alanabit
Date: 19 Dec 02 - 02:24 AM

It was Cluin who made the comment about Moby Dick. Apologies.

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: Thomas the Rhymer
Date: 19 Dec 02 - 02:38 AM

As I was rehersing this evening, I found myself glancing at a book I have just recently finnished, and hadn't put back on the shelf... and then was moved to remember how much I enjoyed it... and that I had not mentioned it here. Well, I've reached the gelling stage for the new song, and... The author of the short stories is Heinrich von Kleist. It has been said that Kafka (who I also failed to mention somehow) was heavily influenced by Kleist's writings, which seems plausible to me... ttr

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: Cluin
Date: 19 Dec 02 - 02:42 AM

Apologies, huh? Not good enough, alanabit... not quite good enough.

I'll see you out on the common at 6 AM sharp. Dress warm and wear good hiking boots. I'd suggest eating light too.

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: GUEST,Raedwulf
Date: 19 Dec 02 - 04:00 AM

Well, I stuck strictly to *favourite* authors, & didn't include authors some of whose works I've read & are very good, etc. Otherwise, yep, I could have included Somerset Maugham, Graves, Silverberg, Dumas, the guy who wrote The Red Badge of Courage (now *there's* an ACWar novel!), Philip K. Dick, John Holdstock, Austen, Peake, & many more besides. The ones I listed I go back to time & again.

I certainly wouldn't include Heinlein or Dickens though. Like Kate I enjoyed them in my teenage years, but then found I didn't like the way he wanted to keep moralising all the time (not quite as bad as Piers bloody Anthony got, perhaps). Plus his social attitudes, let's say, have dated rather badly! As for Dickens, I do read one from time to time, but I'm always astonished at his enormous reputation. He has the most appalling plots, founded on constant unlikely coincidences (often of relation), combined with the worst of Victorian verbosity.

As to books I can't get through, yep, I've false started on Moby Dick two or three times, but another one is Don Quixote. I normally don't have a problem with older writing styles, but I just cannot get going on that one!

Oh, & with all due respect to Shakespeare, I'd class him as a playwright, not an author - out of bounds, surely?! *bg*

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: alanabit
Date: 19 Dec 02 - 06:03 AM

OK Raedwulf, but when BIll was writing the novel was not really established as a literary form. I couldn't agree more about Dickens though - and my what beastly prose!

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: Rapparee
Date: 19 Dec 02 - 06:50 AM

"Your Favorite Authors" -- not "favorite novelists" or "favorite playwrights" (I first wrote that as 'playwrithes' and that seems appropriate for some of them) or "favorite poets" (noted earlier that that should be another thread).

No one has mentioned Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- his "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is outstanding! Or Tim O'Brien for "The Things They Carried" or Defoe for anything *except* "Robinson Crusoe" (God! He had a whole city's worth of stuff to help him 'survive'!) or Bret Harte or Baxter Black or Wallace Macrae (read his "Old Proc" and somebody set "Reincarnation" to music, please) or....

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: Catarina
Date: 19 Dec 02 - 06:50 AM

Now, let me see...
Eça de Queirós (magnificent author!)
Álvaro Guerra (less magnificent, but still great!)
José Saramago (even with the Nobel and everything, I only love some of his books)
And that's for "home" authors. Now for foreign guys in no particular order, since I'm a carnivorous reader:
Oscar Wilde
W.Somerset Maugham
Lewis Carroll
Rudyard Kipling
P G Wodehouse (I've always wanted to have my own Jeeves!)
Jane Austen
Emily, Charlotte and Anne Bronte
W. M. Thackeray
Frances Burnett
E. Nesbit
Mark Twain
Ursula K LeGuin
Anne McCaffrey
Laura Argiri (only one book, but what a book!)
Patricia Nell Warren
Madame de Ségur (I cried a lot, as a little girl, over Sophie's misforntunes)
Margueritte Yourcenar
Simenon
Simone de Beauvoir
Jean Genet (some of it, at least...)
Alexandre Dumas (father)
Elio Vittorini
Cesare Zavattini
Luigi Pirandello
Primo Levi
Vasco Pratollini
Leon Tolstoi
Dostoievsky
Boris Pasternak
Thomas Mann
... God, I do read a lot, should slow down a bit, hum?

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: TIA
Date: 19 Dec 02 - 08:58 AM

Also not mentioned yet is Anon. Perhaps that's because Anon's stuff is so inconsistent...sometimes stunning, other times pure drivel.

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: GUEST,Fred Miller
Date: 19 Dec 02 - 09:06 AM

I don't know about all the social attitudes in Heinlein, I just read one book and it didn't do anything for me. I don't read much sci-fi, I guess I usually can't tell what the reality-average is, and am too lazy to learn. I did love a book called The Artificial Man when I was a kid, don't know who wrote it.

   I made it through Moby Dick last year, but it seemed just like one of those "great" books. I love Hawthorne's short stories, not the ones that are usually anthologised, but things like Wakefield, scraps and stuff.

   Proust. until the fourth volume or so.
   
   I keep promising myself to read Cervantes just so I can read Nabokov's lecture. Nabokov is my only real favorite, in the sense that I like his flaws as much as his gifts--I love it that someone so clever, stagey, florid, etc. can be convincing at all. The way my mother loves Mondrian, who was a pretty bad candidate for the office of an artist.

   There are lots of writers I just don't get--Murder In The Cathedral reminded me of Monty Python. My favorite thing Mann wrote was that Hamlet was "almost certainly" an artistic failure. I love that--"almost certainly". Almost is my favorite word.

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: YOR
Date: 19 Dec 02 - 01:00 PM

Thank you TIA for listing Dr. Seuss. Thats one I forgot, how could I? Doh!

Roy

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: Thomas the Rhymer
Date: 19 Dec 02 - 01:07 PM

I always go back to Tennyson... and then the pendulum swings to Pasternak...

"The Status Quo is our Point of Departure." ttr

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: GUEST,maire-aine at work
Date: 19 Dec 02 - 01:14 PM

Arthur Conan Doyle (I started reading Sherlock Holmes stories when I was about twelve, I think.)

Wilkie Collins (such a short life, but what a wealth of material he left).

Agatha Christie (ya gotta love 'er)

Ellis Peters (Edith Partenger) for the Bro. Cadfael books

Umberto Eco

Dorothy Sayers

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: GUEST,Chuck
Date: 19 Dec 02 - 06:59 PM

Robert Penn Warren (All the King's Men)

W. Somerset Maugham (The Razors Edge)

William Styron (The Confessions of Nat Turner)

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: Cluin
Date: 19 Dec 02 - 07:07 PM

P.D. Eastman (Are You My Mother?)

Helen Wells (Cherry Ames, Army Nurse)

Franklin W. Dixon (The Hardy Boys: The Mystery of the Whistling Snotball)

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: TIA
Date: 19 Dec 02 - 08:38 PM

You're Not My Mother, You're a Snort!

Hooray for Cluin!

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: Nancy King
Date: 19 Dec 02 - 10:40 PM

Count me among the Dick Francis fans. The taped versions are PERFECT for long car trips.

Ken Follet is uneven, but often very good.

Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Patrick O'Brian.

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: Art Thieme
Date: 20 Dec 02 - 12:28 AM

First, foremost, primo and tops in my book---THOMAS WOLFE

Then, in no particular order:

Lafcadio Hearn

John Steinbeck

Ernest Hemingway

W. Somerset Maugham

George R. Stewart

Jack Kerouac

Lawrence Durrell

V. S. Naipaul

Willa Cather

Floyd Dell

Richard Llewellen

J.R.R. Tolkien

Ray Bradbury

B. Traven

Kenneth Graham

Oliver LaFarge

Walter Mosley

Cam Hubert

John Gardner

Sarah Orne Jewett

O.E. Rolvaag

Henry Miller

Sherwood Anderson

Robert Service

-----(submitted by Art Thieme)

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: alanabit
Date: 20 Dec 02 - 02:04 AM

How did I forget John Steinbeck? "The Razor's Edge", by Somerset Maugham, has a slow build up, but it left me in a daze when I read it back in the early seventies. "Cakes and Ale" has another hammer like ending.

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: GUEST,Sarah
Date: 20 Dec 02 - 09:51 AM

JR Tolkien
Chaz Brenchley (Macallan books)
Charles De Lint (Tamson House stuff)
Robert Holdstock (everything)
Douglas Adams
Neil Gaiman
Julian May
Roger Zelazny
Emma Bull (War for the Oaks)
CS Lewis
Shakespeare
Greg Bear (Infinity Concerto)

Cheers
Sarah

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: Kim C
Date: 20 Dec 02 - 11:04 AM

Cluin, in Melville's lifetime, Moby Dick was a colossal failure. It wasn't until it was thrust upon unsuspecting high school kids in English class, that it became a Literary Classic.

I haven't finished it yet either, and some of the 19th century prose is ponderous (like a lot of other 19th century prose) but I think the first few interactions between Ishmael and Queequeg are hysterical.

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: Uncle_DaveO
Date: 20 Dec 02 - 11:06 AM

Amergin: You're right, it's Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
Mea culpa, mea culpa!

Dave Oesterreich

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: Bee-dubya-ell
Date: 20 Dec 02 - 11:30 AM

It's been a while since I read any Heinlein. I swore off of him because of his cutesy smart-assed trying-to-be-funny comments that often had no relevance to what was going on in the book. It's like someone told him he should inject a little humour into his writing and he never got the hang of how to do it gracefully.

And I loved Moby Dick! Of course it may just be that the professor who taught the course in which I read it really made the book come alive. Whether I would have ever slogged through it on my own is another matter. The same is true for The Brothers Karamazov.

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: GUEST,Catarina - at work and not working very much
Date: 20 Dec 02 - 11:41 AM

W. Somerset Maugham - most people seem to prefer The Razor's Edge. I have always prefered Cakes and Ale or Of Human Bondage, and I believe Maugham was the perfect storyteller. His short stories are amazing. All in all, he is my favourite author.
P.S. - Unforgivable! I forgot to put E. M. Forster on my list.
P. P. S - Is there anyone out there who actually likes Proust? One of the "holes" in my reading culture is that I never got to read the whole À la recherche du temps perdu. It bores me beyond description by the middle of the fith volume or so... And since Luchino Visconti died before ever putting it to film I guess I'll never know the story!

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: *daylia*
Date: 20 Dec 02 - 12:15 PM

Margaret Laurence - for "The Diviners"
Jean Vanier - for "Tears of Silence"
Charles Dickens - for "Oliver Twist"
Ruth Beebe Hill - for "Hanta Yo - an American Saga"
Mark Twain - for all those joyous childhood moments we spent together
Lloyd C. Douglas - for "The Robe" and "The Big Fisherman"
Starhawk - for "The Fifth Sacred Thing"
James Mitchener - for "The Source"
Ted Andrews - for "Animal Speak" and "Psychic Protection"
John Steinbeck - for "The Pearl"
Noam Chomsky - but I really have to be 'in the mood'...
Richard Bach - for "Jonathan Livingston Seagull"

I'll leave it at 12 - that's a good round number!

But I do love Shakespeare ...

daylia

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: Kim C
Date: 20 Dec 02 - 03:13 PM

I'll tell you a story I read in college that I really liked: Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. (at least I think it was Kafka, this has been a day or two ago) Anyway poor Gregor wakes up one morning and finds he's been turned into a giant cockroach. He's still the same Gregor except for that, but everyone treats him like vermin.

I forgot to mention that I enjoy Stephen King and Louis L'amour. Good old-fashioned fun fiction. Not that I get a chance to read much fiction anymore...

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: Amergin
Date: 20 Dec 02 - 03:42 PM

yeha that was kafka...wonderful story....

i also like gogol...love the story about the nose....

Subject: RE: BS: Your Favorite Authors
From: Cllr
Date: 20 Dec 02 - 04:14 PM

In no particular order

Terry Pratchet( iwas reading strata before colour of magic came out
Fritz lieber Fafhrd and the gray mouser
Jack Vance Mainly dying earth series
Raymond Feist empire novels good
David Gemmel probably my favourite
Neil Gamon sand man series and good omens
David eddings first dozen books were very good
Tolkien but only hobbit and LOTR
Poul Anderson 3 hearts 3 lions one of my alltime favourites
roger Zelazny Choas series
Jack L chalker midnight well of souls
Asimov Hero, first sci fi I ever read = I Robot
Heinlen Ive got nearly everything in paperback but glory rd tops
Iain M Banks ( even if he is a socialist)
Laurell K hamilton best vampire series i have ever read
George RR Martin Fevre Dream particularly good
David Brin good grief I could go on and on Cllr