[ 3 / biz / cgl / ck / diy / fa / ic / jp / lit / sci / vr / vt ] [ index / top / reports ] [ become a patron ] [ status ]
2023-11: Warosu is now out of extended maintenance.

/lit/ - Literature

View post   
File: 72 KB, 500x333, fk.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
[ERROR] No.2193704 [Reply] [Original]

So /lit/, who is/are your favorite author(s) of all time?

>> No.2193709

Hermann Hesse.

>> No.2193712
File: 21 KB, 239x320, 1289999675852.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
[ERROR]

Probably Yasunari Kawabata.

>> No.2193715

This is a tough one.
ummmm
How can you have a favorite author?

>> No.2193716

Kafka for non-Spanish

Garcia Marquez for Spanish

>> No.2193719

>>2193715

because you man up and pick one

>> No.2193718

HP Lovecraft and Stephen King. Come at me.

>> No.2193732

Kafka.

>> No.2193760

Hemingway.

>> No.2193767

Hunter S. Thompson

>> No.2193791

Christopher Paolini.

>> No.2193795

George Orwell

>> No.2193798

James Joyce

>> No.2193801

Chomsky

>> No.2193803

David Foster Wallace

>> No.2193805

Nabokov

>> No.2193808

Umberto Eco

>> No.2193813

James Roy. You've probably never heard of him because he's me

>> No.2193817

Ayn Rand

>> No.2193818

Charles Bukowski.

>> No.2193832

Robert Walser

>> No.2193833

>>2193817
>ayn rand
>author

Haha. But no, seriously. Who is your favorite?

>> No.2193837

>>2193832
Hah, nice to see a Walser among all the Kafkas here.

>> No.2193841

>>2193803
The Pale King alone wins him my vote. It's like he took the thematic completeness of IJ and squished it into a Brief Interviews-tier mindfuck of stylistic and mechanic excellence.

>> No.2193842

I think 99% of the people who hate on Rand have never even read a page of her work.

>> No.2193844

Michael Crichton.

"Travels" shaped me as a man and made me become the world traveler/writer I am today. Unfortunately he died before I could meet him. If your heroes are living, don't take them for granted.

>> No.2193845

>>2193760
Only correct answer ITT

>> No.2193848

book

>> No.2193850

>>2193842
Because the 1% who have have successfully explained why she's terrible to the rest of the population. Her writing style is terrible, and her ideas are flawed.

Stop being buttmad that people don't agree with your horseshit "philosophy."

>> No.2193852

>>2193844

I tried to read Congo once, work is literally more fun than reading that crap.

>> No.2193854

>>2193850
Don't be butthurt that I called you out on your ignorance. I haven' read her either. That's the point. I'm not going to repeat what some dumbshit on the internet said because it's a popular move.

>> No.2193859

>>2193854
Your reasoning is 10 different kinds of stupid. Do you actually know the mathematics behind Newtonian gravity? If not, I guess, by your logic, you're an asshole for saying it's wrong but not actually knowing the formulas behind Newtonian gravity.

Have you read the Twilight books? How about a single romance novel? I'm going to guess no, but you can certainly tell me what's wrong with them without having touched a single one of them. And you wouldn't be wrong.

Experience is not the foundation nor the soul source of all knowledge a person can acquire. I've read Rand's works, including her interviews, and I've also seen her philosophical assertions written out in logical form. They're retarded. Objectivism is retarded. Libertarianism is retarded as a consequent of being associated with objectivism. Feel free to call someone out on their hatred of Rand if they don't actually know anything about her or her ideas, but plenty of people know her ideas and positions accurately without having read anything she actually wrote.

>> No.2193866

>>2193859
Red herring arguments. Of course gravity is different from literary criticism.

No I would not say those books are bad, nor have I read them. In fact I can see a good argument for any book that gets teenagers to read.

I also find it hard to believe that you've read her works and interviews if you hate her so much. Maybe you thought you could get away with that after I admitted I've never read her. Mostly I don't care. My point is I do not take people's opinions and make them my own nor would I recommend it.

>> No.2193878

>>2193859

I read Anthem and The Fountainhead because /lit/ hates her so much, and /lit/ is usually pretty collectively idiotic. Loved them both. She's not a bad writer, she's a fantastic writer, tied IMO with Flan O'Connor for best female author. Starting Atlas Shrugged two books from now to finish off 2011. I don't agree with her politics, but I can take the better points of her ideals and apply them to motivate my own beliefs.

>> No.2193882
File: 29 KB, 456x337, 1321035617725.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
[ERROR]

>>2193878

>She's not a bad writer, she's a fantastic writer,

Are you fucking kidding me? Did we both read the same book? Because I did read The Fountainhead, and so far I haven't read a book with such horrible characters, tripe and shallow descriptions, stupid dialogue and every character is a Mary Sue or the opposite of. The only thing that kept me reading was the somewhat interesting story, but holy shit, was that dialogue awful, and the prose non-existent.

>> No.2193889

>>2193882
Peter Keating, Howard Roark, Ellsworth Toohey, and Gail Wynand were all complex, richly imagined and flawlessly written characters. Dominique was a Sue, but a great Sue.

I was fine with her descriptions, not her strong point but they didn't detract overall.

The dialogue was a bit spotty, I can agree with you there, though not as heartily. When she was ramming her philosophy in there, it was very effective, but the mundane "small talk" type of stuff left a lot to be desired.

>> No.2193890

>>2193882

Sounds like you read it wanting to hate it, and you projected your way through it.

>> No.2193898

>>2193890

Nope, read it well before I was browsing /lit/ (or heard about the book for that matter). A friend (girl) recommended it.

>>2193889

Well I see that you and I have a very different idea of what a "well developed" character is. All I can say is that all those characters to me felt like bad caricatures of w/e Rand was masturbating to the night before, and Roark's character acted like a Soviet Propaganda hero

To each their own.

>> No.2193902

>>2193878
>>2193817

Reported.

>> No.2193904

>>2193898

I realize I'm in the minority, and hey, you may be right. I liked it very much though. She's the first woman I've ever read to give me the literary equivalent of Courage Wolf. She's not the first writer to jerk off to her own characters, but she might be the strongest woman to have done so.

>> No.2193907

>>2193902

report your own second-hand life

>> No.2193938

michael ondaatje

>> No.2193946

Anthem was just awful.

>> No.2193964

I want to say Steinbeck but on the risk of sounding like a cliché-ridden hipster it's going to have to be a tie between Lovecraft and Snicket.

>> No.2193968

Dostoevsky.

>> No.2193981

Ol' Franz if ya dont mind. Rather enjoyed his buggy life.

>> No.2193999

Clive Barker

>> No.2194009

Hard to say.

Cervantes would be up there. So would Forster.

>> No.2194011
File: 24 KB, 264x413, brautigan-2.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
[ERROR]

>> No.2194015

P.G. Wodehouse, hands down

>> No.2194017

JD Salinger, DFW, Isaac Asimov, GGM, Isabel Allende, OSC.

>> No.2194026

>>2193791
not sure if troll

>> No.2194028

Camus, Dostoevsky, Salinger. I also like Kafka.

>> No.2194031

Vonnegut

>> No.2194062

Borges

>> No.2194090

There are tooo many

Shakespeare, Geothe, Ian McEwan, Saul Bellow, Nicholson Baker, H.P. Lovercraft

and Nabokov and Kafka.....

maybe J.G. Ballard too......

>> No.2194101
File: 59 KB, 440x295, fondo_camus_01.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
[ERROR]

>ctrl + f
>"camus"
>1 result

People can't understand genius when they read it.

>> No.2194110

>>2194090
Yea just pick one we don't give a shit how many of those guys you've read.

>> No.2194130
File: 128 KB, 1190x1536, William_Butler_Yeats.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
[ERROR]

W.B. Yeats

I love the light in this picture of him.

>> No.2194150

>>2194110

if i had to pick one i guess it'd be shakespeare. it sounds cliche though,

>> No.2194156

Hemmingway
Ovid

>> No.2194160

I don't see what's so great about kafka. Ive read the Metamorphosis and The Trial, neither of which I saw the fuss about. The premise of metamorphosis is awesome but you can appreciate that without even reading it.

I'm more than happy to be told how wrong I am, as long as I'm told why.

>> No.2194163

that's a tough question.
Clarke or Donaldson.
They are so different that I can't pick one.
So if I could never read one again... hmmmm
I'll stick with Donaldson. I could be biased in that Clarke is dead and Donaldson has another book on the way...

>> No.2194166

David Foster Wallace.

I feel like I have an unreasonable man crush on him. I'm not gay but I get pretty jealous every time I read that he had a wife.

>> No.2194203
File: 28 KB, 240x308, JD SALINGER.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
[ERROR]

JEROME DAVID SALINGER IS MY FAVORITE AUTHOR. THE IMAGE ATTACHED IS MY FAVORITE PHOTOGRAPH OF HIM.

>> No.2194291

>>2194203
i've tried several times but just couldn't do it

>> No.2194308

2'nd or 3'rd (thread too long to read)
Hitchhikers Guide to the galaxy
anything by Douglas Adams will give you a different perspective on life.
Even the misc. stuff off his computer after his death is good.
Dying while working out was his final irony. Just seems right.

>> No.2194435

Camus, Cervantes, Dostoevsky

As far I can see I've named the best combination in this thread.

>> No.2194444

Vonnegut, Pratchett, King, Butcher, Verne, Baum, Tolkien, Dumas, Adams, Asimov, Parker

>> No.2194562

Nabokov

>> No.2194580

Dostoevsky
Hesse

>> No.2194595

>>2194166
>>2193841
>>2193803
I'm with you guys.
Haters gonna hate.
James Joyce, too, Pynchon, Donald Antrim, Melville, McCarthy

>> No.2194607

>Ayn Rand
>good writing

lolwut. Next you guys are going to say Tolkien was a fantastic writer.

>> No.2194612

>>2194607

so edgy! so /lit/!

>> No.2194621

>>2194612
Feel free to try and defend Tolkien's awful, dry writing style. Why not defend H.P. Lovecraft while you're at it.

I've read and enjoyed all of their works, but I'm not some pseudo-subjectivist who conveniently only defends things I like. Which is 90% of this board.

>> No.2194625

1 - Leo Tolstoy
2 - Salinger
3 - Gustave Flaubert
4 -

>> No.2194632

>>2194621
Tolkien is a legitimately excellent writer. His prose is certainly imperfect, although some elements of it, seeming to be flaws, may in fact be conscious decisions of style. Tolkien is really really good at tone and I think one can mistake him writing in high language for bad prose.

I am perfectly willing to acknowledge that things I like are bad and things I dislike are good. I also think that Tolkien is a good writer taken on his own merits.

>> No.2194644

>>2194632
I think Tolkien was a brilliant source of ideas who defined a genre, but his chosen career in academia is very obvious in his writing. I think suggesting he was, in some way, intentionally bad with pacing is a bit much, and reading Tolkien is one of the more legitimately passive experiences in classic lit.

I love Tolkien, but I'm not so sure I'd say he's the pinnacle of writing. Nor would I call him "excellent." I think he was brilliant, and his abilities did not match said brilliance.

>> No.2194668

>>2194644
Well, I think you have to differentiate between different elements of writing, I guess? Like, he's obviously not a master of prose. It can get stilted and dry and verbose. That's a true fact. Some of that is stylistic, some of that is just his inability to write... But Lord of the Rings is still a great work despite his inability to write because of his ability to bring together myth and folklore in a new form, and because of what he does with it, his use of irony and his combination of a huge number of different modes of literature and basically I really think that Lord of the Rings is very, very good. The things he's good at aren't necessarily the things he's popular for, though... Excellent or not? At some point we're just arguing pedantics.

>> No.2194676

>>2194668
I once heard the reason he wrote LotR was to create a history for Europe, which sorely lacked it on its own merit at the time. I'd say it makes sense, as there are times his work reads like a history book.

Again, I give him all the props in the world for what he accomplished in Fantasy, but I'm discussing his abilities as a writer, not as a worldbuilder.

>> No.2194679

>>2193704

I played Bioshock 1 AND 2, also I read Ayn Rand's wiki. HURR DURR I AM EXPERT

>> No.2194684

>>2194679
Nice reference fail. It's funny that the randroids are so easily buttmad that their deity's philosophies are easily dismantled. But, it's not like I can expect many people on this board to have even a basic understanding of legitimate philosophy. Of which Ayn Rand is not a member.

>> No.2194686

>>2194676
Not a history, but a mythology (and not for Europe, but specifically for England). That was certainly part of his thought-process in creating the world, and it's why he drew so much from existing folklore. And it's certainly very, very visible in the Silmarillion. Not so much in Lord of the Rings, although it certainly has the flavor of the heroic saga and the epic and the literary cycle. Again, that's what he was drawing from.

What makes him a great writer isn't the world he made, but the way he drew from those sources to create a new story, and the quality of that story. Which, again, is excellent. He's a great writer because he made something that is clearly folkloric and at the same time filled with deep irony and high emotion, and at the same time is pretty clearly an anti-modernist work of nostalgia and a reaction to World War I and the state of modern Britain... it's a great work because it manages to use folklore and ancient myth (as well as Christian religion) to create something new which is grand on its own terms, and which has real relevance for the world it was written in.

>> No.2194704

>>2194684
>legitimate
>philosophy
pick one.

>> No.2194711
File: 61 KB, 501x680, hamsun-ung.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
[ERROR]

knut hamsun
louis-ferdinand céline
malcolm lowry
gerard reve (dutch)

>> No.2194722

>>2194711
what's your opinion on pierre drieu la rochelle, anon

>> No.2194731

I also like writers who weren't nazis

>> No.2194733

>>2194684

Cool story, bro. Enjoy Bioshock 3

>> No.2194734

will look into la rochelle!

>> No.2194742

>>2194731
something wrong with the nazi's? Or do you get your history and politics and ideologies from jewish hollywood/academia?

>> No.2194747

>>2194742

just saying