Fifteen writers

[altariel]

The Rules: Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen authors who’ve influenced you and will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Consider yourself tagged if you want to be tagged.

Here are my fifteen. I've taken ‘authors’ to include novelists, poets, and non-fiction writers. You don't necessarily have to, though.

• Jane Austen: Again and again you go back – to all the books – and you’re delighted and awed. I like Persuasion best, although Mansfield Park has absorbed me most.


• Chris Boucher: Instilled in me at a very early age a deep of love of awesome dialogue. And then broke my heart.


• TS Eliot: My head pops and fizzes when I read Eliot. Yes, this is what words should do.


• Sylvia Engdahl: Her two YA novels (Enchantress from the Stars and The Far Side of Evil) gave me a girl lead and first made me think sociologically.


• Hans-Georg Gadamer: He made me think about truth. And method. And helped me understand how I understand the world.


• Emma Goldman: She’s fabulous and right.


• Isabeau of Greenlea: Dear partner-in-crime.


• Tove Jansson: Moomins! Melancholy! Tiny anarchists! And her grown-up stuff turns out to be brilliant too.


• Brendan Kennelly: Poet of varied vernacular voices.


• John Le Carré: Secretly I want to write books like these when I grow up.


• Ursula Le Guin: Opened world upon world for me. Courage and encouragement.


• Francine Prose: This is mostly for her inspirational book on writing, Reading Like A Writer, although I’ve liked the handful of her novels I've read too.


• Marilynne Robinson: Sentence for sentence probably the best prose I’ve read.


• Gitta Sereny: Brilliant biographer of Albert Speer and nemesis of David Irving. Deserves the Nobel Prize for Literature.


• JRR Tolkien: The lens through which I read the world. Best beloved.

Comments

[carl-allery.livejournal.com]

Fascinating list. I don't often pick up tags or challenges, but I may well do this one. I made sure to make a list before I read yours and surprised myself with the names on it, which I guess is the point of things like this, that they make you think about yourself and your personal world.

I can only really comment on Tolkien, whom I first read at age 6, or possibly younger because that was my 1st attempt at LoTR, and on Austen, who is a craving like chocolate but, surprisingly, hasn't actually made my list. Boucher, of course, I've enjoyed without really being aware of - which may or may not be a compliment. ;)

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Tolkien and Austen seem to be making most lists! (And Le Guin.) Did you post your list? I don't think I saw it.

[sheenaghpugh]

I massively love Jansson's adult story Taking Leave; in fact the closer I get to extinction, the better it is. Awesome economy and lack of sentimentality.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, that's a fantastic story.

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

Is this supposed to be about writers who have influenced your writing? I did spend five minutes thinking about it this morning, and came up with three names, the third of which I have now forgotten. Maybe I should post instead about my long-standing inability to remember more than two-thirds of any list I have not written down.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I took 'influenced' in the broadest sense: influenced how I think, how I relate to the world, how I write. Anything, really.

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

Don't think I could do it in fifteen minutes, even if I split them over a few days... though it would partly depend on whether I put the group of Athenians who put me off imperialism under a single heading.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Take as long as you need; I think these rules are for breaking. Only if you think you'll enjoy doing it, though.

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

Don't think I'm ever going to get round to this - too much other stuff to do. So I'll just tell you that the two I remember coming up with in the first fifteen minutes (well, right away - it was after that that my mind started blanking) were my father and Matthew Engel.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

It's always a pleasure reading your father's writing.

[azalaisdep.livejournal.com]

We had exactly the overlaps I would have expected :-) Though I didn't attempt to articulate why I've put people on the list, and in some cases would struggle to do so; some of the authors I read as a child, for example, such as Antonia Forest (particularly Peter's Room) and Susan Cooper, affected me in ways I couldn't have put into words then, but which I knew (and still know) were profound...

Am going to have to go and look up the ones on your list I'm unfamiliar with, now!

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I think the only one on your list I didn't recognize was John A. T. Robinson. I can't now remember what did for religion for me. I think it was probably Marina Warner's Alone of All Her Sex, but that came on the back of a lot of other stuff.

[jhall1.livejournal.com]

We have three out of fifteen in common: Austen, Le Guin and Tolkien.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

An excellent trio.

[wormwood-7.livejournal.com]

I couldn't resist this one, and have posted my 15.

I came late to Eliot's poetry. It was an astonishing discovery.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I also came to Eliot late (mid-twenties counts as late, I think). I was quite obsessed for a period of time. I don't think I've been in a writer as thoroughly since I was a teenager and immersed in Tolkien.

[katlinel.livejournal.com]

That is a wonderful list. Gadamer is on my reading list, although my brain is not quite in mode for that much concentration at the moment. My reading group also has Goldman as a possible suggestion for the book list.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, I'd save Gadamer for the New Year and some more brain power. Is it Emma Goldman's bio you're planning to read, Living My Life?

[katlinel.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if it's got as far as a actual book - just a general suggestion for doing a book relating to revolutionary women, with Emma Goldman being one of the suggestions. The biography looks more readily available than some of Goldman's other works so we might end up doing that.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Some of her essays are available at Project Gutenberg, I think.

[katlinel.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the tip!

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Huh. That was me, but for some reason it posted anonymously. Weird.

[kvaadk.livejournal.com]

Okay your icon for this post is a detail from an Analog cover from -- how many decades ago? The story was about a race with absolute pitch. Every note in their language had the same meaning, with harmonics as modifiers. Human inflection -- combined with no two humans having the same voice -- frustrated them no end and they were despairing of ever establishing communication until ... I forget. And I forget who wrote the story. Mind like a steel sieve I've got. Always liked the story's premise; daydreamed variations over the years -- nothing I can use, too derivative.

Other authors? Wait -- I'm supposed to read, too? Is there no end to this?

Heinlein for his get-the-job-done attitude toward writing.
Morrison for her lush and layered use of language.
Le Guin for her imagination and world building.
McDonald for his mastery of first-person building a mystery while playing fair with the reader.
Stout for almost the same reasons as McDonald.
Camus for his light and airy comedies (just checking to see if you're paying attention)
Hillerman for his ability to infuse every line with an adopted cultural perspective until it becomes the reader's.
Rusch -- her historical fiction and "hard" science fiction -- for her ability to make the past alive and vibrant without anachronism and to make complex concepts accessible without breaking the stride of the story.

That's eight (seven and a half if you lump McDonald and Stout) in as long as it took me to type. I'm sure I'll think of others.
Going to steal this format for my next Novel Spaces column on the third -- making it the second time I've cribbed from your blog for my own. Keep coming up with these great ideas. Saves me a world of work.

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Apologies for the slow reply - I've fallen behind on responding to comments on LJ over the past couple of week (heavy teaching schedule).

I did not know the provenance of the picture in my icon! My lovely friend sallymn made the icon (and this one), and I used them because I liked the sentiments. This one also has a similar provenance (a Larry Niven story, IIRC).

Very glad I was able to oblige with this meme! There was another one going around about 15 characters that have been important to you, but I haven't had the chance to do that one. Another column, perhaps?


(just checking to see if you're paying attention)

*Always* paying attention! ;-)