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 |