Your favorite writer

There seems to be a common appreciation for the Russian novelists (Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy) on this site. I find that interesting. I share that admiration.

I also love Oscar Wilde, even if he did only write a single novel. The man's anagrams are pure genius.

Of course, I appreciate God's work, and also occasionally read Kierkegaard, Poe, Shakespeare. I've read the other German / French existentialists, but have lost interest in them. Dabbled in Salinger and Vonnegut in High School, but likewise, have not found them as compelling now that I am older.

T

When you say "God's work," is it the Kierkegaard to which you refer? Do you mean to include also Poe and Shakespeare? (As tone is impossible to communicate/decipher through text in a discussion thread, know that this inquiry of mine is neither sarcastic nor disrespectful in any way, but rather, one amiably rooted in genuine interest.)

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Originally Posted by ThatIndividual

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, George Orwell, Friedrich Nietzsche...

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Someone is an existentialist. You forgot Kierkegaard.

My favorite books were written 40-50 years ago or more

Lit. Fiction:
Aldous Huxley (#1 favorite)
George Orwell (who denies the power of 1984?)
Anthony Burgess,
Ray Bradbury (F451: The only lit. fiction book I've read where the author is still alive)

Drama/Playwrites: Shakespeare (I loved Macbeth and I plan to read Hamlet)
Henrik Ibsen for Enemy of the People
Arthur Miller

Indeed. I've been accused of that more times than I can count. However, we existentialists tend to shun the label 'existentialist.' So really, I'm the non-existentialist existentialist. I disagree with every existentialist I've ever encountered in some way or another, as they all do with one another.
(Actually, it's from Kierkegaard that I lifted my screen name. I love him very much, despite his religious deficiencies :) Little joke there. I guess...

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Originally Posted by Countess

There seems to be a common appreciation for the Russian novelists (Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy) on this site. I find that interesting. I share that admiration.

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I like Dostoevsky more than Tolstoy. His psychological insights go much deeper. "The Kreutzer Sonnata" is the only Tolstoy novel I really enjoyed. "Anna Karenina" is soap operish like Flaubert's "Madame Bovary." And "War and Peace" is far too long with too many characters.

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Originally Posted by Countess

I also love Oscar Wilde, even if he did only write a single novel.

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Me, too. Wilde was the supreme European wit. Too bad he died so miserably.

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Originally Posted by ThatIndividual

Indeed. I've been accused of that more times than I can count. However, we existentialists tend to shun the label 'existentialist.' So really, I'm the non-existentialist existentialist. I disagree with every existentialist I've ever encountered in some way or another, as they all do with one another.

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It wasn't an accusation. Existentialism was the most influential philosophy of the 20th century. Some of my best friends are existentialists.

>When you say "God's work," is it the Kierkegaard to which you refer?

I see why you ask. Taken metaphorically it could be argued that all good literature is a derivative of God, since God is the ultimate source of all talent.

Hmm...I meant the Bible, but now that you mention it, your implication is more accurate.

>Do you mean to include also Poe and Shakespeare?

For the record, if you've read "The Imp of the Perverse", you understand I can imagine no greater work on the psychology of sin in the mind of man (except Chapter 7 from Doestoevsky's "Notes" that bears a *very striking resemblance* to "Imp".).

Shakespeare - all his tragic figures notably asked the very gravest of life's questions.

Good question / conversation.

You could call me an exexistentialist - LOL - but it's a lie. Every day I get up I wonder why.

T

Originally Posted by Countess:
I also love Oscar Wilde, even if he did only write a single novel.
Starwriter said:
Me, too. Wilde was the supreme European wit. Too bad he died so miserably.

I have a friend who is intimately aquainted with Oscar Wilde - knows his biography by memory, met his sons and is familiar with his father's work. Wilde was the victim of his own decadence, which ironically he parodied in Dorian.

It is sad. In my opinion, he has no peers like other writers.

T

I didn't take it negatively. An accusation isn't always bad.

I just added that signature coincidentally. I surely don't mean that to be directed at anyone. I think now that I've seen it in print again I'll remove it! Sorry if anyone was offended. :angel: :angel: :angel:

Oh, good it's been removed!! (It was some lyrics to a song by a writer that I adore. I realized that given the context of one of these very recent discussions that it was likely to offend, and likely to offend more than a little.)
Anyway, cheers!

What's with the anti-Joyce? I realize he is hard but I thought the people in these forums, were I don't know, intellectuals? I like to believe there is an art in what Joyce threw down, even if he was a jerk. Look at Hemingway.

Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, L. M. Montgomery, J. K. Rowling

Ian McEwan, Bernard Cornwell, Emily Bronte, and many others...

Neil Gaiman, Ray Bradbury, Shakespeare, Terry Pratchett, Geoffrey Eugenides, Anne Rice, and a whole roomful more.

I enjoy Jorge Luis Borges for his wonderful worlds.

I enjoy Ernest Hemingway for his masterful control of details: the iceberg principle.

I enjoy William Faulkner for his suspense and emotional impact.

I enjoy Samuel Beckett for his humor and clarity of medium.

Ah, cool. :)

Ray Bradbury, Robert Louis Stevenson, HG Wells, Michael Chabon, Dean Koontz, Michael and Jeff Shaara(s), Erik Larson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Shakespeare, Agatha Christie and CS Lewis.

Louisa May Alcott (yeah yeah, I know, many people think I'm childish), Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, William Golding

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Originally Posted by ;2196

And for poetry, Wilfred Owen is by far one of the best i have had the pleasure of reading. His war poems are tremendous and go into great detail the life during and after the War.

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Ooh, very much agree with this comment. I've read every poem of Owen and Sassoon. You should take a look at Sassoon's 'Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man' and 'Memoirs of an Infantry Officer'.

'Parable of the Old Men and the Young' by Wilfred Owen is by far the greatest poem I've ever read. It's included in Regeneration, the movie, where you can also see Owens, Sassoon and Robert Graves. At the end of the movie Dr. William Rivers recieves a letter from Sassoon, I believe, where it says that Owen has been killed in France. Sassoon included 'Parable of the Old Men and the Young' in the letter and you can see Dr. Rivers dropping a tear or two. That scene always makes me want to cry.

For those who have read about WW1 and know what the men in the trenches went through, what kind of massacre WW1 really was, this poem will make a lot of sense to you.

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son....
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

Oh, and I also like 'Spring Offensive' and 'The Sentry' by Owen.

Shakespeare, H.G. Wells, Orwell, Dante... I'm sure there are a few more, but those are the ones off the top of my head.

Melville, purely for Moby Dick, Dostoyevsky, Pratchett and Orwell.

Plato, Pearl S. Buck, Steven Pressfield, and Roger Zelazny.Also, maybe Keith Taylor, so far I've liked the Bard series.

I enjoy Hemingway, Orwell, Wells, Buck, Bradbury, early King, Capote, Joyce, Faulkner,Kafka, Tolkien....way too many to list. I think I read Hemingway more than anyone else.

Victor Hugo, Melville, Dumas, Camus, Ken Bruen, Roddy Doyle, Dan Simmons, Anna Gavalda, Fred Vargas, Daniel Pennac, Arthur Conan Doyle (not just Sherlock Holmes folks!), George Pelecanos, Philip K. Dick, Jasper Fforde, Maupassant, Michel Houellebecq and Vladimir Nabokov!

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Originally Posted by Granny5

I enjoy Hemingway ... I think I read Hemingway more than anyone else.

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:thumbs_up

Call me a weeping willow, but I like Sylvia Plath...I loved her dark sense of humour in The Bell Jar and I really love her evocative style.

P.G. Wodehouse is another favourite, without a doubt. Hilarious comedies with feel-good endings. His jokes and turns of phrase have made me laugh out loud on the bus more than once.

Jane Austen also has a great sense of humour, as well as a great way of creating characters...to the point that someone actually wrote an entire book about Mr Collins alone.

My favourite writers are Friedrich Hölderlin and Franz Kafka, the former due to his hauntingly beautiful writing style combined with the highest ideals and an ethereal character, the latter more because of his topics, his disillusionment, simply the way he describes reality.
There are many more writers that I thoroughly enjoy, but those two are my absolute ikons. I feel a strong affinity to both their personalities and biographies. Noone describes the world how it is better than Kafka, and noone can compare to Hölderlin when it comes to how the world should be.

Dostoevsky, Hugo, Tolstoy.

A tie between Hesse and Kafka.Two of the greatest writers of the XX century,in my opinion.

Steinbeck,Faulkner,Dostoevsky,Hugo,and Vonnegut.

poet would be Pablo Neruda... Writer is Dostoevsky... and there are so many others I love as well but these two first and foremost...

Tolstoy, Goethe, Pushkin

Stephen King. Now, before you pounce on me, he is my favorite to read, that doesn't mean I think he is a great author. Just fun stories to read. Now, as for who I appreciate most for there literary talent, I'm not sure. I haven't read enough yet.

My top five is Hemingway, Beckett, Kafka, Camus, Chekhov and those tend to remain the same, but yeah I also love Faulkner, Dostoevsky, Bukowski, Salinger, Flaubert, Hunter S Thompson, P K Dick...

Emily Dickinson would have to be one of my favorite writers, she puts deep feelings into her poetry and has been recognized for it.

well i read not that much and many of the books mentioned above i am just planning to read but i think i can mention some:
F. Dostoevsky, J. Steinbeck, Shakespeare, Hemingway, Harper Lee, Turgenyev, Orwell, Woolf, and many others
=)

Faulkner is my all-time favorite, then Shakespeare, J.M. Coetzee, and Vonnegut. I have a taste for South African literature or literature set in South Africa or South African writers, like Coetzee and Doris May Lessing. My favorite themes are usually ones that deal with race (Faulkner, Coetzee, Lessing)...I don't really have an explanation for this, maybe it's being raised in the South that did that to me, but it happened that way, and I just find those books fascinating. But Faulkner takes my cake.

P.S. I also really loved The Bell Jar. I am hesitant when it comes to female authors, and I don't like much of Plath's poetry, but I just really related to Esther Greenwood (heroine) in a way that's almost scary, and so I absolutely adored that book. It's probably one of my top 20. Just incredible.