Yes, he’s purely on my list for The Hours. A spectacular achievement. Christie gets it for being prolific and my favorite comfort read (it’s my list after all). She wrote some absolute crud. Not exactly Shakespeare. But the twist in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and others puts her on my personal list.
To tell the truth, Alan Moore is - in my opinion - the greatest writer alive, but I didn’t want to offend elitist sensibilities by adding a graphic novelist to the list.
Yes, he’s purely on my list for The Hours. A spectacular achievement. Christie gets it for being prolific and my favorite comfort read (it’s my list after all). She wrote some absolute crud. Not exactly Shakespeare. But the twist in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and others puts her on my personal list.
To tell the truth, Alan Moore is - in my opinion - the greatest writer alive, but I didn’t want to offend elitist sensibilities by adding a graphic novelist to the list.[/quote]
I deeply appreciate people who offend elitist sensibilities.
in no particular order
Alexandre Dumas
Hugh Lofting
L. Frank Baum
Ian Flemming
Alistair MacLean
I’m adding three who will certainly offend elitists 
:
Edgar Rice Burroughs: I’ve read the John Carter of Mars series a few times and, for the past year or so, the e-books in this series and the Tarzan books are what I read over many dinners-for-one in China when I’m there on a job. Perfect reading when you’re tired after a long work day.
Lloyd Alexander: Some people call the Taran series a rip-off of Lord of the Rings, but I found it vastly more entertaining than anything Tolkien wrote, and original at that.
Lawrence Block: The Matthew Scudder novels are fine brain candy.
Best Australian authors: Peter Carey (Bliss is a good start, then Illywhacker, or example). Helps if you do know a bit about Australia
Helen Gardner (short stories)
Michael Brennan (Poetry)
White: old school and tendentious, but reasonable
David Foster.The Glade within the Grove (1999), a Miles Franklin Award winner
Kennealy: Schindler’s Ark, etc.
JM Coetzee: adopted into Australia.
Nick Cave: The Ass and the Angel (if you like it a bit different).
Gould’s Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish is a 2001 novel by Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan. Stunning! even better than Carey at times.
I’m not very good at reading lots of books by the same author, or of remembering what I’ve read more than a year or so back, so I’m going to just go with “some good books I remember reading lately” – in no particular order.
[quote=“urodacus”]Best Australian authors: Peter Carey (Bliss is a good start, then Illywhacker, or example). Helps if you do know a bit about Australia
[/quote]
Thanks urodacus. I know a lot about Australia. Fucking love the place–remember when you advised me on what to do and drink in Sydney last year? I go to Melbourne every year on business, read a lot of books about Australia, have several friends there. If I have my choice, I’ll pull a George Harrison and get a place there to hang out at when I’m an old fart.
Anyway, thanks for the recommendations. They’re on my list.
[quote=“Brendon”]I’m not very good at reading lots of books by the same author, or of remembering what I’ve read more than a year or so back, so I’m going to just go with “some good books I remember reading lately” – in no particular order.
Many have mentioned Ishiguro and Coetzee now. I’m going to have to read some of their work. Thanks for the other recommendations.
If you’re looking for beach fiction from an Australian, check out Peter Temple’s In The Evil Day (it’s in my bookcase as Identity Theory, that its American title). I think I read that novel straight through; it’s a right smart page turner. Smart as in gripping as well as brainy. I have Temple on my list of authors to read when I have more time. I also mean to get through Colleen McCollough’s Rome series some day (another Australian I believe).
[quote=“urodacus”]’
Nick Cave: The Ass and the Angel .[/quote]
The Ass Saw The Angel. 
Fucking antipodeans. Can’t quote their own authors for shit. :aiyo:
Another novelist I like is Daniel Woodrell, although his earliest novels are not aging well (dialogue wise anyway). An exception is Woe To Live On, which was adapted by Ang Lee into his underestimated film Ride With The Devil. Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone is very well written, though, and much much better than the movie (for example, in the novel Ree Dolly’s siblings are both boys, and in my opinion the callous way the youngest, more sensitive brother is a throwaway life - because he shows no early propensity for violence - is much more tragic than the film’s idea that the youngest sibling, a girl, is not valued because she by definition has no propensity for violence; also, Woodrell’s characters are far creepier than those in the film, but this might depend on having actually had personal interaction with such characters…certainly every button I have was pushed by the author).
Woodrell is a fellow Kansas University alumnus who writes about the bizarre bermuda triangle of white trash culture a.k.a. the SW Missouri/NW Arkansas area of the Ozarks. My first wife was a Cass County, MO, girl, and I know far too much about the whole William Quantrill thing going on there. Woodrell has a remarkable ear for the language and and a very good eye for the customs of the area.
[quote=“jimipresley”][quote=“urodacus”]’
Nick Cave: The Ass and the Angel .[/quote]
The Ass Saw The Angel.
Fucking antipodeans. Can’t quote their own authors for shit. :aiyo:[/quote]
Fucking Saffers. Can’t quote their own icons for shit.
That was the name of the series, right? The next in the trilogy was ‘The Ass Did the Angel’, and the third was ‘The Ass Threw the Angel’‘s Dismembered Body in the Ocean’…
Get it together, jimi.
Joseph Conrad (my son is named after him! 
) Yes, another vote for Conrad. It’s surprising to read so many mentions of his name. Most people I know, unless they’ve studied Literature, have never heard of him. Perhaps he appeals to those of us with wanderlust.
Sebastian Faulks - always manages to make me weep, and for some reason that’s a good thing. :s
Pat Barker - wrote a great WWI trilogy and her other stuff is good too.
Writers who I enjoy reading for the sheer pleasure of experiencing their writing - Mervyn Peake and Thomas Hardy.
Conrad’s “Nostromo” was on my O-level reading list in college. It was much more interesting than Jane Austen’s “Emma”. This thread has got me back into reading novels. I wanna read some more stuff by Coetze,Paul Auster, also Philip Roth. Don Delilo’s “Underworld” is another book I will get around to reading one of these days.
Henry Miller
Joseph Conrad
Gabriel Garcia Maquez
Bernard Cornwell
Barry Unsworth
Dostoevsky
Mikhail Lermontov
Peter Carey
Where are all the great female novelists?
George Elliot and Virginia Woolf. Urgh!
There are others I’ve liked: Robert Roth (Sand in the Wind), John M. Del Vecchio (The Thirteenth Valley), John Horne Burns (The Gallery), John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath and Cannery Row), Victor Hugo (The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Misérables, only in translation), Leo Tolstoy (only War and Peace, and only in translation), Laurence Sterne (Tristram Shandy), Ernest Hemingway (of his novels, I’ve only read For Whom the Bell Tolls), Thomas Pynchon (I’ve only read Gravity’s Rainbow; some of it is disturbing–for reasons I don’t want to go into–and disappointing, but he’s brilliant), John Kennedy Toole (A Confederacy of Dunces), F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night). . . .
Kurt Vonnegut, eh? No disrespect to you, Mr Jack, but I never quite got it.
Much like Joseph Heller, Jack Kerouac and that utterly overrated moron, William Burroughs. I guess I’m a bit thick.
And to ThreadKiller: Alan Moore is a novelist. One of the greatest.
[quote=“jimipresley”]Kurt Vonnegut, eh? No disrespect to you, Mr Jack, but I never quite got it.
[/quote]
He’s an amazing literary stylist.