About writing and my favourite authors
I was going to write, rail, rant and rave about, oh I don’t know, my usual; the media, cultural tourism, generic festivals, consumption, lies, deceit, blah, blah, blah but having the ezine hacked into yet again – this is the second time in as many weeks – I’ve decided to change tack. I need to get away from negativity for a short while – I need a welcome relief – well at least for a few hours. There is nothing worse than trawling through directories and files; searching, checking, deleting, copying, pasting, scanning, backing up, reorganising and re-starting all over again. It makes my head sore.
I need to jump into a book, any book, my latest book, who cares as long as I don’t have to think about the amount of wasted time some bastard, some robot, inflicted upon me.
Yes, books. I love books. Always have, always will. If I could sit and read all day long I’d be the happiest man on earth. To me it’s a refuge, a place of education, action, emotion, history and above all good story telling. I read a wide range of books – I’m quite democratic in that sense – so long as they’re well written; crime, history, classics, graphic novels, pulp, biographies, politics, philosophy, art. I love the places I’m taken too, beautiful descriptions of the everyday, the plot twists, the bringing to life of times past, new ways of looking at things, thinking of things, the opposition, the fight, the understanding, the learning, the camaraderie I have with the characters that jump out of the pages and live inside my head.
Writing and literature has informed my life more than any other artform and I sometimes wish I could add to it, wish I wrote, had the gumption, the need. I hold all writers in such high regard and perhaps someday I’ll gather the will and the wherewithal to attempt a scribble of my own.
So what do I like? What are my preferences? Well I tend to read male authors (I don’t know why), I haven’t read as many Irish authors as I probably should and I tend to read contemporary fiction. This is reflected in the list below in which I’ve named a few of my favourite writers (in no particular order). There are many more but I fear the page will go on and on. So please, feel free to add your favourite authors to the list, I’d love some feedback on my list, the authors, their work, and remember if you’re looking for a good book these writers are as good a place as any to start:
Paul Auster
Colum McCann
John McGahern
James Lee Burke
Philip Roth
Antony Beever
W.G. Sebald
Orham Pamuk
Gunter Grass
Saul Bellow
Ian Rankin
John Moriarty
Sebastian Faulks
William Trevor
Lewis Hyde
Sebastian Barry
J.M Coetzee
Philip Kerr
Michael Connelly
Henning Mankell
Henry Miller
Flann O’Brien
William Burroughs
J.R. Tolkien
Jack Kerouac
William Boyd
E.Annie Proulx
Kurt Vonnegut
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