John's Blog: Favorite Authors
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Favorite Authors
This is one part of a two-part series, the other being Favorite Music. I was going to have them both on a single page, but it got too wordy. I don't generally have a single "favorite" anything. Some things seem too trivial to decide what is my favorite, such as colors. (Of course, I'm not a visual artist either.) With others, such as musical groups or authors, I find that I can't truly rate the ones on my short list relative to the others, because they are all good, but in different ways. So these two pages are mainly autobiographical, with the general favorites presented chronologically rather than ranked.
(I also recently added a seperate blurb about my favorite text editor.)
I've always liked reading, even if I didn't really like English class that much throughout most of my schooling, being more a math and science geek academically. My earliest favorites, circa junior high school, were Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. The ones I remember liking the very most were Red Planet and Tunnel in the Sky. The latter was probably one of my earliest stimulations to thinking in sociological terms, as it concerns a group of young adults stranded on an unfamiliar planet and having to not only band together for survival, but also build up their own civil government and social customs from scratch as the years go by without rescue.
A similar sociological and historical exploration may be found in Robert L. Forward's Dragon's Egg, in which he traces the development of a civilization among sentient beings who have evolved on the surface of a neutron star, and the history of contact between them and we Earthlings.
Just to show you what a math geek I was, I also read a non-fiction book by Asimov around this time (~1980) on using a slide rule, and bought one, although they were already pretty much obsolete by then. I was just curious. I never actually used it.
My liking of academic reading increased quite a bit senior year of high school, when I was in a smaller class that was configured as a discussion circle that included the teacher rather than the teacher facing the students and lecturing. The class also required individual outside reading of books. This was when I really took to John Steinbeck, first reading The Grapes of Wrath, then, liking that so much, East of Eden, which I liked even better. Grapes of Wrath was an early influence on my concern with oppression and social justice, which became more developed during college. Steinbeck in general probably helped me move away from my previously narrow literary interests of science fiction and fantasy.
Speaking of which, it was also around this time that I first read J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy (that doesn't really need a link, does it?), which I have re-read several times since. I've also started The Silmarillion about 5 times, never once having been able to finish it. I'd love to hear from anyone who has, as I don't think I've ever met such a person. :-) (J.R.R. himself never actually finished writing it anyway, so maybe we can blame his son, who compiled it from his father's notes, for the dense and difficult prose style.)
[Update, 2/4/04: I just met someone who has finished The Silmarillian. He is 13 years old. He admits that it was pretty confusing the first time, and even sort of confusing the second or third times, but that "after that, it got easier". More patience than I...]
As an adult, I discovered John Irving, my favorite books of whose include The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany. If I absolutely HAD to pick an all-time favorite book, it might be that last one. Irving's books are way too complicated to summarize, so I won't even try. The Amazon.com reviews at the pages I've linked to can do that for you.
In case you are a film buff (which I am not), I'll mention that I really liked the film version of Cider House, probably because Irving wrote the screenplay himself. He most emphatically did NOT write the screenplay for Simon Burch, based (very loosely!) on Owen Meany, and I personally advise you to stay away from it! (Specifically, I thought the speakover technique was extremely cliched, and the pacing felt like they tried to stay relatively close to the book until they realized it would take too long, at which point they tacked on a horribly sacharine made-for-TV ending that had nothing whatsover to do with the book and called it finished. Very disappointing.)
Another little thing I like about Irving is his tenacious insistance on the continuing relevancy of the semicolon, although it has long since ceased to be fashionable among most modern writers.
Most recently, I really liked Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, and was inspired to also read Pigs in Heaven and Prodigal Summer. Many reviewers seem to fault Kingsolver for how overtly she inserts her politics into her books, and maybe I would agree with that from a literary standpoint, but I also happen to agree with most of her politics, so at least I admire her for making her points better than I could. I think that she is a pretty good writer whose concern for some of the issues she writes about is admirable and necessary.
[Update, 6/16/04: I'm growing fond of Richard Russo, a Maine author who won the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls (soon to be an HBO movie). I'm currently reading an earlier book of his, Straight Man. The writing reminds me greatly of Irving, and in fact, among quotes on the back cover, one compares him to Irving, and the other is from Irving himself!]
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