Author Recommendation Poll

[queerbychoice]

The last time I tried this proved sufficiently informative that I have to inflict a bunch more authors' names on you already. But after this, I'll be finished reprioritizing my entire reading list!

Like last time, all of the following are authors I've never read any books by, but have been planning to try reading books by. Some of them write fiction and some of them write nonfiction.

[Poll #503195]

(Again, if you haven't read any books by any of them, don't worry - neither have I!)

Comments

[gamesiplay.livejournal.com]

I've read and liked a number of the people on your list, but I'm still not sure whom I would recommend and whom I would recommend highly. So my votes were a little arbitrary. Also, I'm iffy on a number of them--I find them a little scattershot, or I simply haven't read that much by them. (E.g., Timothy Findley; I loved The Wars, but have read nothing else by him yet.)

Also: B. Traven, GOVERNMENT.

[kalte.livejournal.com]

I didn't recommend William Gibson because I just can't see you being one of the Neuromancer-changed-my-life crowd, since you don't apparently really like science fiction, and because while it's beautifully written and put together, it isn't aging particularly well -- Gibson actually imagined the future of technology and the internet quite poor.

If you do decide to try Gibson, you would actually probably prefer his last, Pattern Recognition, which is set in the present, or even the book he co-wrote with Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine, which is an alternative version of the Industrial Revoltion that speculates on the computer age coming a century early. And read the first chapter of Count Zero simply because it is the best writing he could ever hope to do. If I'd written that chapter, I could die happy.

But if you want to try this kind of novel, skip Gibson for the present and read Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. It has a lot of advantages on Gibson - an actually likable, realistically rendered female heroine, a writer who actually understands technology even when he's writing the purest fiction.. it takes a little while to get going, but you read the modern literary novel, you can take it!

Re: Also: B. Traven, GOVERNMENT.

[kalte.livejournal.com]

He imagined it poor-LY. It was a long night.

Re: Also: B. Traven, GOVERNMENT.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

I actually have liked some science fiction, most notably The Female Man by Joanna russ. But it's true that I haven't tended to like very much of it, and I've never really tried to read the cyberpunk kind of science fiction. Anyway, if even a William Gibson fanatic like you doesn't think I would like William Gibson, I will definitely cross him off my list.

[dzuunmod.livejournal.com]

Little thing: I think the last name in the first poll should be Timothy Findlay. If it's the Canadian you're referring to, anyway.

I haven't read anything by him, but Elizabeth rather likes him. In particular, she likes Not Wanted on the Voyage. I don't feel as though I have any authority to actually fill out your poll.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

Ah, that would explain why I was having trouble finding anything about him. Yes, that's the one I meant.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

. . . Although, on second glance, his name really does seem to be spelled Findley. Or at least, that's what Amazon.com lists him under.

[dzuunmod.livejournal.com]

Huh, you're right. I could've sworn...

[legolastn.livejournal.com]

You must read Voltaire. My senior English professor had me read Candide for some optional something-or-other. It was an important step in my descent into perversity.

[frankepi.livejournal.com]

these surveys of yours are reading like a laundry list of names i've always intended to read....

anyway: you should read Wharton if only because you're read Henry James' Midnight Song. if you read Gibson, everyone will tell you to startr with Neuromancer which i guess makes sense, but his most recent Pattern Recognitionis the one that made me take him more seriously. as for Byatt: i don't know whether she's great but you may as well read Possession now or everyone will just keep recommending it and giving you copies of it until you do...

i'm reading Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem at the moment.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

"these surveys of yours are reading like a laundry list of names i've always intended to read...."

That's probably because they're my lists of names I've always intended to read . . .

I'm currently not planning to read either Gibson or Byatt anymore, as a result of the responses I've received here.

[wanderingrogue.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised that you've never read Eudora Welty. Some of her short stories are pretty standard in Intro to Lit classes in college. I must have read "A Worn Path" five or six times throughout my collegiate career.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

Yeh, it's actually very possible that I did read some short stories by her - but I haven't read any books by her, and whatever short stories I may or may not have read did not leave me with any established idea of whether or not I would want to read books by her.

However, I also suspect she's taught less in California than in Oklahoma, because even though Oklahoma isn't in the South, it seems generally less anti-South than California tends to be.

[zdamiana.livejournal.com]

I recommended Byatt after carefully reviewing your wording and deciding that I do "highly recommend" her, but do not "very highly recommend" her. Here is a link to my review of A.S. Byatt's Possession. As you'll see in my review and the subsequent comments, I found Possession worth reading, but flawed.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I remember reading that, and it may even be the reason Byatt's name ended up on this list in the first place.

[nouveau-prole.livejournal.com]

Jeez Gayle, I have big respect for your eclecticism on the reading front, but I don't like the majority of the authors on your lists, too bourgeoisie for me.
But at least music-wise we both enjoy David Bowie's stuff.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

Well, which ones do you not like? That's what the last question on the poll is for, and if you do not answer it, then it will be all your fault that I have to actually bother reading them in order to find out how bad they are!

[nouveau-prole.livejournal.com]

All I can advise is, stop reading for a while and write your own stories/novel. I'm sure you can do it - and derive much pleasure from the doing.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

Although there is nothing wrong with advising me to write, such advice does not constitute an answer to my question. Why are you evading my question? Although there are certainly some authors on the two polls I posted who are quite mainstream and bourgeois, I am inclined to suspect that your impression that they are the general rule of the lists rather than the exceptions results mostly from your own failure to recognize the names of any writers who aren't bourgeoisie. For example, Opal Palmer Adisa is from Jamaica; Ama Ata Aidoo is from Ghana; Hanan Al-Shaykh is from Beirut; Isabel Allende is from Chile; Sandra Cisneros is from Mexico; Pearl Cleage, Lorraine Hansberry, Billie Letts, and Margaret Walker are African-American; Thu Huong Duong is Vietnamese; Louise Erdrich is Native American; Nuruddin Farah is from Somalia; Athol Fugard and Bloke Modisane are, respectively, a white South African and a black South African; Philip Gourevitch is a white male American whose financial background is probably quite well-off but whose book is about genocide in Rwanda; Khaled Hosseini is from Afghanistan; Freidoune Sahebjam is from Iran; Jhumpa Lahiri and Kamala Markandaya are from India; Wang Shuo is from China; Pramoedya Ananta Toer was a political prisoner in Indonesia; Zoé Valdés is from Cuba; Luisa Valenzuela is a political exile from Argentina; Jingsheng Wei was a political prisoner in China . . . it's very difficult to see how you can dismiss a list that includes all of these people with a generalization like "bourgeoisie."

[nouveau-prole.livejournal.com]

You are quite right. I was just going off the few writers that I know on the lists, and incorrectly assumed that they were all of the same ilk.

[xkcd.livejournal.com]

I'm resisting the urge to check people just because I recognize their names or have read something by them. I tried reading Don Quixote once, but lost interest partway in.

Someone asked me about books I enjoyed, and I responded:

I liked Cryptonomicon a lot, but it's kind of a niche book. Wildly popular among computer geeks. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, by Richard Feynman, is a wonderful book about a cool guy I admire a lot. House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski, is a mindfuck with about eight levels of narration and annotation piled on top of a Blair Witch-style documentary about a house with impossible tunnels and doors in the walls, all of it fictional, all of it packaged in this crazy book. And you might want to check out Beyond Fear by Bruce Schneier, which does a good job of explaining how to think about security and risks. Also, Enchantment, by Orson Scott Card, is a fun story. Parliment of Whores is P.J. O'Rourke's first big book, where he tries to explain the entire U.S. Government. 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories, edited by Isaac Asimov, is a really neat collection of one-to-three-page sci-fi and such stories. It's cool because they have to distill the "point" of the story down to nothing but a single sharp, hard point. Smoke and Mirrors, by Neil Gaiman, is a collection of non-sci-fi short stories, many of which are quite good. Blankets, by Craig Thompson, is a touching and bittersweet first-love story in graphic novel form. Big and thick and mostly autobiographical.

[xkcd.livejournal.com]

I think I'll make an entry!

[wordspore.livejournal.com]

I love, love, Sandra Cisneros. More her poetry then her fiction though (although I have not read her fiction that she is the most famous for: The House on Mango Street).