Your Top 5 Authors of all time

[socialdtk]

Originally Posted by Connemara

Flannery O'Connor Robert Caro Turgenev George Orwell Evelyn Waugh This is hard. I also am young and have not read as many of the "classics" as I need to.
In 6th grade my class was given an assignment that consisted of picking a short story from a table top covered in short stories, reading it, and then giving a 5 minute presentation summarizing the story in-front of the class. I was lucky enough to snatch Flannery O'Connor's Good Country People before groaning and walking sadly back to my desk ( what kid wants to read 19 pages over the weekend ). Anyway... the ending was good... It involved the Bible, booze, a condom, a stack of dirty playing cards and a prosthetic leg. The moment I started talking about this my presentation was moved into the hallway with only my teacher as the audience. She wrote a letter to my parents apologising for the content she had introduced me to. I've been a huge Flannery O”Connor fan ever since.

 

[Miles Gloriosus]

Originally Posted by tagutcow

I am insecure.

Uh-huh.

 

[Pangolin]

-CÃ

line
-Beckett
-Guibert
-Borges
-Villon

Edit: need to put Joyce and Faulkner somewhere. Five isn't enough!

 

[Imhoff]

Not sure if these are my all time favorites, but authors I do enjoy reading

-H.G. Wells
-Chuck Palahniuk
-Ayn Rand
-Paulo Coelho
-Ray Bradbury

And for fun I read Koontz (Odd Thomas series) and Douglas Preston/Lincoln Child (love the Agent Pendergast character)

 

[tagutcow]

Originally Posted by Miles Gloriosus

Originally Posted by tagutcow

I am insecure.
Uh-huh.

I was getting a boner.

Originally Posted by octopandda

Edit: need to put Joyce and Faulkner somewhere. Five isn't enough!

Yeah, they should be on my list too. I enjoyed "As I Lay Dying" in high school, but had to bow out halfway through "Absalom, Absalom!"-- something which I never do. I quite enjoyed Ulysses, but will probably never even try to touch Finnegan's Wake.

 

[socialdtk]

Originally Posted by Miles Gloriosus

Have you read any of his journals? It can be compelling stuff when he isn't tripping balls talking about a rock.

Yes, and read the Communist Manifesto soon afterwards, along with Ãœbermensch by Nietzsche, All three volumes of Capital by Marx, and various books of poetry by Ezra Pound. All a huge waste of time aside from Pound. It took me years to get off my communist kick.

Ginsberg's journal/letters did contain some fantastic writing and helpful insights that made the rest of his work much easier to understand. I also found his correspondences with Kerouac and especially Burrough's ( an anarchist at the time ) to be truly entertaining.

 

[Miles Gloriosus]

Hey! The Communist Manifesto is a fun, short read. I agree that Capital is a messy *************. Have you ever read Trotsky?

 

[Dr. Mabuse]

Originally Posted by Miles Gloriosus

I gotta ask you about this. Lovecraft is really terrible and I've wondered what the appeal is.


Lovecraft was the first writer I ever really got into as a younger teen. I understand the mixed critical reception, and the complaints about his expository flourishes and the archaic prose but I think the power of his imagery still stands out for a lot of people. He is definitely an acquired taste.

 

[Miles Gloriosus]

I think Cthulhu is a cool concept. Not much else.

and Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn't have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse.

This isn't clever. Yes, he was attempting to describe otherwordly architecture, but the result is just gibberish.

 

[Gradstudent78]

Tom Robbins
Nick Hornby
Greg Bear
Chuck Palahniuk
Edgar Allen Poe

 

[Tokyo Slim]

I'm going to interpret this as "favorite" and not "best".

Wm Gibson
Murakami
Dickens
Kipling
Poe

Hon. Mention:
Dahl
Twain
Hemmingway
Verne
Heinlein
Melville
Crichton
Camus
Anthony
Rucker

 

[Althis]

if we're going for favorite...

tolkien
orson scott card
clarke
twain
asimov

easy to tell what kind of books i like, i still have plenty of time to develop

 

[EZETHATSME]

Guess I'm supposed to only pick 5, but that's like asking 5 top musicians (which yes, you can ask and try to do) but I think it's better to break it down within genres. I know that's not what you asked, so if you'd like, pick five from my total list.

Classics Tolstoy Hemingway Steinbeck Twain Cormac McCarthy (Feel he's earned a place in this category. Pop Fiction Michael Connelly Greg Iles Nelson DeMille Lee Child Larry McMurtry Fantasy Tolkien Robert Jordan Patrick Rothfuss George RR Martin Stephan R. Donaldson Tons of others, hard to pick top fives. I love to read, across most genres. EZ

 

[philipp]

In no particular order
Franz Kafka
Mark Twain
Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Kurt Tucholsky
Stephen King

 

[Tangfastic]

I read for relaxation and escapism so my top authors are fun and easy to read:

Haruki Murakami
Douglas Coupland
F Scott Fitzgerald
Phlip K Dick
Angela Carter