Which Author Most Inspires Your Awe?

@iris_mex said in #12:
> I relly like HG wells !
may be)

"Awe" is a tough concept to grasp here. Do you mean awe at the ideas--or at the style?

To me Alan Garner at his chiseled best is pretty awesome (a sort of hallucinatory minimalism). Also the terse grit of Postman Always Rings Twice or David Goodis' Dark Passage.

But then--coming at things from a completely different angle--there's Holden Caulfield fairly leaping off the page at you. And the first part of Valis (before Phil got bogged down in all that Tractate crap).

Then too there are the Perfect Narrators. Like the one for Alice In Wonderland (or Don Quixote).

But style can be overemphasized as well. Guys like T S Eliot and James Joyce could certainly craft a mean sentence ("On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins")...but the sheer pretentiousness of much of their work just leaves me cold.

So many,... I'll start with Homer, Melville, Saint-Exuperey. Right now I'm deep into Seamus Heaney's translation / reworking of Beowulf and not tired of it after many re-readings. Recently finished Murakami's 'A wild sheep chase' and am still befuddled, bemused and bewildered by it.

Bill

J RR tolkin, J K Rowling. Enough said

@HiramHolliday said in #9:
> I find the obituary columns in newspapers fascinating. It is remarkable how people die in alphabetical order.

Alphabetical order? Not very imaginative if you ask me.

I am not much of a fiction reader, but a few authors did impress me when I was at a tender age. Everything from Salinger I have read as far as I remember. Updike. A bunch of Russian authors.

But these days I mainly read headlines...

@ohcomeon_1 did you come across Anton Chekhov’s short stories?

@aia12 said in #20:
> @ohcomeon_1 did you come across Anton Chekhov’s short stories?

I remember reading them on the train to a village where I was supposed to help my father (sadly diseased now) with some countryside construction projects. Funny how books bring up memories from the past.

Jacob