|  stvbec7 | Mar 9, 2007 10:22pm | | I would choose Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina as my top choice. I like his tone and style; the language is rather subtle, but profound. Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is the kind of book one has to read frequently to better grasp its meaning. I also like Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex for its grand epic writing. Middlesex is essentially about a history of a hermaphrodite. Both books are a great read if one likes history. |
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|  DarklingPlain | Mar 10, 2007 8:30am | I'm actually a huge fan of the Czech novelist Milan Kundera -- most famous for The Unbearable Lightness of Being. But I love most of his novels -- The Joke, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (this may be my favorite), Life is Elsewhere, Immortality.
(The novels following Immortality were originally written in French, and somehow I don't like them as much.)
I like Kundera because his intrusive narrator is somehow so attractive, like having a very erudite and articulate friend with a cynical view of everything. I like the way Kundera takes our most cherished sentimentalities and subjects them to a kind of corrosive dissection. And yet for all that, he's quite moving.
I think what I like best about him is that he, more than any novelist I know, describes what a trap the world is, and how our pursuit of our own sentimental, self-aggrandizing ideas leads us to torment ourselves and others.
Oh, and he's the only writer who can write about sex properly -- as a subject of comedy. |
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| | Sangfraud | May 19, 2007 7:28pm | | Many writers have produced one or two books that I read over and over, however for developmental (I don't know what else to call it) writing, Idries Shah has no equal to me and in the field of fiction I am intranced by the work of J. G. Ballard. |
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Sponsor |  Denise-R | May 31, 2007 5:27pm | | I don't do 'all time favorites', but right now I'm very happily lost in Gaston Bachelard and Paul Celan. |
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|  MikeFrench | Aug 5, 2007 12:46am | Julian Barnes. My favourite of his is 'Talking it Over. It's brilliant, feels like Julian Barnes is inside your head.
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 |  2785660 | Mar 19, 12:11pm | | Oscar Wilde. I don't think anyone has understood the essence of men better than him. |
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| | nails58 | Mar 21, 12:14pm | quelle dilemma!
quentin crisp is up there |
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| | nextword | Mar 24, 4:51pm | Me.
Daft question.
Daft answer. |
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| | Marysinner | May 8, 3:06pm | | Haruki Murakami, his "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" is my favorite. |
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Writing/Writers → Discussion