Some of us like what I like to call Joycean writing. Joycean writing is very difficult to interpret a lot of the time and is filled with a stream of consciousness like prose style that makes me personally want to kill a tiny puppy. Some of us like simplicity accompanied with tears, while others like simplicity accompanied with sex. I like Vonnegut, Richard likes Lady Chatterley's Lover, and Jan likes Jeffry Eugenides. I like post-modernism, Dan likes modernism , and Donna likes romanticism.
I guess if I expect you to tell me what you like, I need to tell you what I like. I like Vonnegut :). I like Southern writing such as Fitzgerald, Rick Bragg, and Truman Capote. I also enjoy a few short story writers that also dwell below the Mason Dixon (Check out The Bear Bryant Funeral Train...its pretty good stuff). Tom Robbins is pretty cool also, along with Julian Barnes, Ferrol Sams, Raymond Chandler, Chuck P, and Charles Bukowski.
Now...my definition of good writing would definitely include tears, laughter, smiles, dead farm animals, and a glance into the past, present, and future.
What is your definition? Who do you like and why do you like them?
Twain--because he was so realistic with the human language and the way our brains mangle what it can do--and what humans do to each other with language, among other things.
ReplyDeleteAnd O. Henry (William Porter)--because he had a vocabulary that could fit several volumes as well as an eye and ear for the common person's trials and tribulations.
To add to this, James Michener could take a chunk of history and mold it like clay into names and stories that came to life as a living novel of time; and a guy you never heard of: Peter Tauber, who wrote a terrific book called The Sunshine Soldiers: a reflection on the '60s effort to avoid being sent to Vietnam by joining the National Guard.
ReplyDeleteThe army didn't have a clue about how to manage itself--and Tauber raked it over the coals for its inept ways.
Finally, another Peter: Peter Jenkins, who walked the Appalachian Trail in 1973 and wrote of it for National Geographic. The book became the first of his social traveler's perspectives, A Walk Across America. He later crossed to the west coast on foot, bought a 200-acre farm in Tennessee where he took up farming, traveled to Mongolia and climbed Mt. Everest in Tibet, sailed a cabin cruiser boat throughout the Gulf Coast and met the people who lived along its shores before Hurricane Katrina destroyed the area, and took his family to the deepest parts of Alaska, where he lived and sledded with the hardy souls in Pt. Barrow.
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