Who are your favorite authors?
My two personal favorites are John Steinbeck and Jack Campbell. I’ve been a fan since I read East of Eden (the first literary novel I read.) His views on social interactions and the life of the average man (to be fair he didn’t write women that well) still ring true today. I really liked him because he might not have been an Asian man, but he understood the immigrant life a little and was one of the rare white authors of his time who made a non-white character a major important character in the book (with the beginning of the sage wise Asian trope.)
Jack is my current favorite SF author. Best known for “The Lost Fleet” series. I like the story and the characters as they navigate the galaxy and the race of idiots known as humanity. A few years earlier, I might have put Heinlein here but he’s fallen more than a few places as one realizes that he and his quasi libertarian views helped shape the minds of Silicon Valley’s angry nerds trying to take over the world (Musk, Thiel and many many many others.)
Mostly I read romance novels for escapism, and the authors run the gamut of super blah to very good. I can provide some recommendations if anyone wants. A key requirement of the genre is the HEA – the happily ever after – which means that books always end well and rarely to bad things happen to main characters in the stories. Which makes it comforting to read.
When I’m looking at nonfiction, I quite like Jon Krakauer. His books deal with very hard subjects, often involving sexual assaults. I will say while I very much appreciated his book Missoula, I definitely had to tell myself to close the book and step the hell away at times because while I was not assaulted in college (the unwanted groping and other minor shit happened, but not the bad stuff), the experiences he discusses were very much oh yeah that’s how it was. It sucked.
Gary Taubes is a science writer who focuses on diet and nutrition and I like his works, too. He provides a lot of technical information but does a solid job making it approachable.
The latest arc from Luann might be worth reading — go back ten days or so from here.
https://www.gocomics.com/luann/2023/01/14
I’m annoyed the imaginary author is a man given that the vast majority of authors for the genre are women.
But otherwise, great arc.
Have you heard about the romance writer who faked her own death and has now come back to life? The story broke on Tiktok a week or so ago and is now all over the mainstream media.
https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/14/romance-novelist-faked-death-susan-meachen
Yeah that’s been something else.
I typically don’t read self-published authors because their works sucks. Note – I don’t mean indie authors. Self-published romance authors’ works typically read like someone who wrote shitty fanfiction in college and then decided they could make money writing their own stories.
Yeah, it’s a weird community. My daughter had a friend in HS whose mother was a self published romance writer. I think she spent more time in chat rooms and on Tumblr than she did writing. Like, all her time. So much drama from grown ass women, lol.
One of my favorite Dorothy Parker quotes is, “A hangover is the Wrath of Grapes,” speaking of John Steinbeck, sort of.
Dorothy Parker on A.A. Milne
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1928/10/20/far-from-well
John Connolly hasn’t written anything I didn’t like. I loved the first dozen or so books by George Pelecanos, but he really fell off. I couldn’t even finish the last two books I started.
I have several favorite authors – Peter Matthiessen, Tony Morrison, and Tom Perrotta to name a few. But if I had to pick just one it would have to be Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Faulkner. For an American, he just hits so many things so well. The ways he dug into race and history, capitalism, and for that matter the fraught relations between men and women and the roles they’re pushed into — just astonishing.
Go Down Moses is an absolutely towering look into how the screwed up relations between Whites and Blacks doomed so much of where we are, and that doesn’t even get into how much he dealt with issues of Native Americans and the ruining of the environment. The long section of it titled The Bear is an absolutely nutty tangle of words, but getting through it is absolutely worth it.
And you can argue that Go Down Moses doesn’t even reach the heights of The Sound and the Fury, Absalom Absalom, As I Lay Dying and Light in August. His not quite greatest hits like the Snopes books, The Unvanquished and The Wild Palms are still great, and he wrote tons of great short stories.
He was a great scriptwriter too! He got credit for To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep. And he could write hilarious sneaky comedy too. Just a wild, wild talent.
For non fiction my favorite author is Hampton Sides. I think my favorite book of his is Blood and Thunder about the history of NM and the royal fucking over of the native populations there.
My favorite fiction author is Stephen King. Come at me.
His short stories are 10X better than his novels. Come at me.
Tilly Wallace, Heather Raconteur, Charlotte E English, and many more.