Nice list. I'm with you on Burroughs, Kesey, Bradbury, Orwell, and Moore. (Sounds like a law firm.)
Kesey was a two-hit wonder for me--I liked Sometimes a Great Notion better than Cuckoo's Nest. And I never read any of Orwell's fiction, but his essays are the best. He grabs you by the throat with amazing opening lines, and chokes the life out of you with his endings. (I particularly remember an essay called "Such, Such Were the Joys" about British public schools.) I'd have to add Robert E. Howard to Burroughs. Conan was a little dearer to my heart than Tarzan or John Carter, but they were a delightful trinity for the adventure-starved adolescent I once was.
Did you add Gertrude Stein because you needed a woman on the list, you Lang alum, you? For me that woman is Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice just does it for me. The rest of her stuff I could take it or leave it, but the way that book completely twists around your first impressions of its characters (and the way their feelings for each other go topsy turvy) is just amazing. And nobody writes a wittier send-up of annoying personalities than Jane Austen. She's got some bite! The main character in that book is at worst tied for my favorite character in all of fiction, if not the outright winner.
Thanks for sharing. I feel all readerly-happy now.
your 15
Kesey was a two-hit wonder for me--I liked Sometimes a Great Notion better than Cuckoo's Nest. And I never read any of Orwell's fiction, but his essays are the best. He grabs you by the throat with amazing opening lines, and chokes the life out of you with his endings. (I particularly remember an essay called "Such, Such Were the Joys" about British public schools.) I'd have to add Robert E. Howard to Burroughs. Conan was a little dearer to my heart than Tarzan or John Carter, but they were a delightful trinity for the adventure-starved adolescent I once was.
Did you add Gertrude Stein because you needed a woman on the list, you Lang alum, you? For me that woman is Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice just does it for me. The rest of her stuff I could take it or leave it, but the way that book completely twists around your first impressions of its characters (and the way their feelings for each other go topsy turvy) is just amazing. And nobody writes a wittier send-up of annoying personalities than Jane Austen. She's got some bite! The main character in that book is at worst tied for my favorite character in all of fiction, if not the outright winner.
Thanks for sharing. I feel all readerly-happy now.
-Ben F.