Hand down: Richard Brautigan.

His "simple" little stories completely reshaped my entire way of seeing things when I first encountered them and the direction I walk is still based upon the impact he had on me. I cannot imagine a world where he did not exist...

- Thomas Pynchon
- Fyodr Dostoyevski

also hands down, richard brautigan, though i have hard time admiting it because i feel very protective about it, so thats all youre getting out of me on him . . .


also, though less protective:

daniel pinkwater

maurice sendak (i have never been dissapointed by the books he chooses to illustrate, and the ones he writes are fantastic)

paul auster (films included) though sometimes id like to punch him for tempting me with non existant films in "book of illusions". I WANT TO SEE THEM SO BAD!! (and i cant stop thinking about them, even after over a year . . . )

Paul Auster

Jim Dodge

Milan Kundera and Umberto Eco.

I think I just might get obsessed with Arturo Pérez-Reverte now I finished The Flanders Panel. Hope his other novels are just as good.


--
mika

italo calvino, jeanette winterson, jose saramago, milan kundera, julio cortazar, violette leduc

haruki murakami
neil gaiman
elisabeth luard (tho she's not so prolific, alas)
joan didion
richard brautigan
italo calvino


if i had to choose one, it'd be murakami.

Hmm. Just my list.

Steinbeck. He creates the most vivid characters I've ever read about.
Orson Scott Card. Complex morality issues mixed with sci-fi concepts.
Frank Herbert.. He created geo-political sci-fi.
Emile Zola. Great character (he only seems to have one *grin*) mostly wrapped around the attempts of french poor trying to create new anarchist societies (and failing miserably)

Well, these are kinda genre-based but I don't know why. Anything that is remotely distant from the norm is labeled sci-fi/fantasy it seems. I have never read a Philip K. Dick book I didn't totally love. He blows me away, a total mind fuck but a good one. An intelligent one. His short stories are excellent (and hollywood just NOW is jumpin on that bandwagon and this shit is 30 yrs old. idiots) Also, Michael Moorcock, writes dark fantasy, and also alternative history. Totally awesome, not the usual good v. evil bullshit but more like a law v. chaos.

Neal Stephenson definately, and Winston Churchill right now as well.

~Sam

Anita Brookner

Herman Melville, Charlotte Bronte, Kobo Abe, Honore de Balzac, RAYMOND CHANDLER!

Tom Robbins, for several reasons, but to keep it nice and simple, his metaphors make milk shoot out my nose even if I haven't had milk for weeks. I like that in an author.

John Irving, Russell Banks, Raymond Carver, Neal Stephenson, Henry James, Ford Maddox Ford(The Good Soldier is the closest thing to a 'perfectly' constructed literary work, IMHO)

Kundera
Camus
Vonnegut
and recently, Gao Xing Jian (sp?) I mean, I've only read Soul Mountain, but it is one of the best books I've ever read.

Neal Stephenson
Steven Brust
Neil Gaiman
Terry Pratchett
Orson Scott Card
Alan Moore
Cory R. Doctorow
Jhonen Vasquez
William Gibson
Mark Danielewski
Nick Sagan
George R.R. Martin
Umberto Eco

Thats about it for this year. Cannot seem to find anything outside of scifi/fantasy, besides Henry Miller, that interests me.

(Yet another) Neil Gaiman
Jeanette Winterson
Sarah Waters
Nabokov
bell hooks
Michelle Tea

F. Scott Fitzgerald, definitely. I have the same feelings about women that he carries and can simply be extracted in his short story - "Winter Dreams."

I wrote a piece recently that takes on the southern drawl gentleman narrator in a piece about his meeting Zelda as broadcast on public TV some years ago.

You could pick up any Norton Anthology of American Literature though and point to any name and I would have to say that I would salivate.

There is Elliot Perlman, who I think wrote the best short story ever created called "The Emotions Are Not Skilled Workers" as found on Granta's issue 71 under the title Shrinks. The greatness of Perlman is that he uses a psychologist, who is communicating to a woman I assume he is in love with, as narrator. The woman has an estranged husband the psychologist is also seeing. The woman and her estranged husband share a child. The story makes you cry a thousand tears because it is beautifully engineered and described.

Paul Bowles, Arthur Rimbaud, Virginia Woolf (but, so far only her A Room With A View strikes me), Jeanette Winterson's Art [Objects], Paul Auster, whose The Art of Hunger compilation of essays really did it for me - former resident of Berkeley, California and student of joblessness for a time and then lecture note-taker for CAL, where I only made $37.5 per lecture written and published.

There is Gustave Flaubert, Albert Camus, W. Somerset Maugham, whose Razor's Edge is my life's description.

George Oppen, William S. Burroughs (but I am afraid only after seeing David Cronenberg's version of Naked Lunch, which is actually a compilation of Burroughs’s life's work, did I begin reading and finding the genius tidbits that are often like islands in the stream of Burroughs’s incomprehensible banter.)

Andrezej Szczypiorsky, who wrote Self-portrait with Women, which is again how I look at the world. The women I meet determine my life’s work and the relationships I have.

Joan Didion, Julia Cameron, Ayn Rand, Eric Fromm, Edmund White, Leo Tolstoy, Thom Gunn, and Louise Gluck, who wrote Proofs and Theories.

But, if you are like me, the introductions are usually the images on the cover that while on visitation to a bookstore, in a moment of leisure, in a mindset drawn over with moodiness and desperation to make this all sensible, our need for beauty draws us to authors whose few and plenty words that speak of beauty and truth become our obsessions. Most of us link to the stream of consciousness that moves from one epiphany to the next, like the literary dots, letters on the page, on our drugged arms. Every word for us is a clear, lucid grace of the dream state of eloquence.

I swear by Penguin Books or Vintage International. I live for every word that comes at me in those moments when I am at the right place at the right time. - Mario

i was introduced to will self by a professor in grad school and have been really into his work since.
other writers whose work i love:kafka,SHAKESPEARE,camus,hesse,kureishi.
i could go on for days!
heh!

well i'll say who i really like:

i agree with the large number of Vonnegut and Kundera choices. i just wrote a paper on the former and want to read more of the latter when i get time (having only read the obvious unbearable...)

others I like a lot at the moment:

Ian McEwan
Margaret Atwood
Alan Bennet
Mark Simpson
Deleuze
Derrida
Levinas

In alphabetical order:

Ray Bradbury
Robert Heinlein
Victor Hugo
Vladimir Nabakov
Ayn Rand
Jeanette Winterson
Emile Zola

What ever happened to Zora Neale Hurston? "Their Eyes Were Watching God" is probably one of the best books I've ever read.

Non-Ficton:
I'm liking Simon Winchester a whole hell of a lot.
Edmund Morris of the Teddy Roosevelt biographies
Eric Schlosser of Reefer Madness and Fast Food Nation
Michael Moore
Loung Ung - First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of the Cambodian Revoultion

Fiction:
Barbara Kingsolver is Amazing.
The above mentioned Zora Neale Hurston
Ernest J. Gains - A lesson Before Dying is a must read

Kids:
Barbara Cooney - Miss Rumphius


To name a select few authors and some of their books.

I don't see her anywhere so maybe my choice isn't literary or nerdy enough...Colette.

I have adored her writing for years and years...she writes like a painter.

Of course, during my more depressed years, I was TOTALLY obsessed with Yukio Mishima and Violette LeDuc.

Phillip K. Dick

absolutely love his paranoia, take on reality, his theories on people's relationships to animals, drug culture, and everything else. somehow when i read him, i feel like he's really talking to me somehow.

Charles Bukowski (is MY God)
John Fante (Buk's God)
Jack Kerouac
Ken Keasy
H.S. Thompson

Clive Barker
Samuel Langhorne Clemens
Rudyard Kipling
Dylan Thomas
Douglas Adams
Isaac Asimov

many MANY more...

The Neuroscience of Christopher St.
By Christopher J. Bradley
4/24/2003 5:42:26 AM
�2003
for William

I.

Lady Ada�s fingers dance,
On an ivory punch,
And the cards fly,
She is the first,
Of the mutltitudinous,
Modern day conquests of Babbage.

Our new Rome rises,
The seeds scatter through the wilderness,
Sowing the Grapes of Wrath of Milnet,
In the homebrew clubs.

A hundred thousand Mitnicks are born,
On the waves of fruitfully colored sand,
Vacuum tubes shine Basic on the retinas,
Of young wizards and fighters.

This is the Proving Grounds of deep space,
The calculators have long since fallen by the wayside,
In the currents of the war to end all wars,
They will be the relics of an established author.

I am a young keyboard player,
With a Commodore 64 and an RCA television,
The magazine arrives and I trip my vision,
Over the letters and sculpture on the cover.
Cyberpunk.

William Gibson and Bruce Sterling,
Inspired musicians and artists it said,
Some of the kinds of artists,
That took up the animal rights and other political causes.

The journalist pointed out the new move,
From Industrialism to Informationalism,
I had to come to terms with them,
I asked my aunt for some money to buy a first book at Walden�s.

The flechette of his stylo needles text into thought,
Case is fixing up at the Gentleman Loser.
Molly is tooled up all in leather with her deadly nails,
3 jane is mixing up signals in the Spire.

Riviera is taking in the Scorpion Sting,
The Hwang is cutting Black Ice on the Hitachi,
Case is riding the back of a silver virtual shark,
The Turings are being offed by the landscape spider drones.

Neuromancer is plotting a merge with Wintermute,
The haunting spectre of the Finn is overshadowing his communiqu�s.
On the Sensenet riot hack by the Panther Moderns,
The Masses are executed like code.

II.

Time froze and I got to work,
My BBS became Sensenet,
My handle was Flatline,
Suddenly dragons and outer space,
Turned into Coding and Implants.

All of the colors became vivid,
I had to get an IBM,
The true tech heads came out of the webwork,
The Matrix found me with Charles.

Bobby Newmark punches deck,
While his mother�s hooked on stim,
His problems with the vampires are many,
With their shark cartilage makeovers,
And their jet set whores.

The spirits of Ja are rattling out their Voodo incantations,
Of the fragmented archetypes of the Voidspace archipeligoes.
While her eyes shine on the catfish farm,
And her father�s polycarbon nightwing,
Crashes during a Yakuza hit.

Turner sets tensor rigs in her hotel,
To take out the flak Mercs,
And ushers her into infamy,
In the Davinci contraption Fokker.

III.

That�s about the time I met Andy,
The Star Wars role-player.
And the walnut hit the car,
And we scattered into the woods,
The party was broken.

One night we spent time in Andy�s garage,
Fanning out the drums on a single snare,
From the Violent Femmes,
After I bought his 800k Floppy Drive,

�Let me get out, Like I Blister in the Sun.�

Sally Shears is shopping with an Origami princess,
While Angie Mitchell makes her Debut,
Everything is Stim now,
The world wrapped out in goggles.

A Chrome face hangs in the void cover,
A ghetto cruiser has a skull headpiece,
The judge is resting in the garage,
This is Gentry�s turf and Bobby�s on a slab.

The Voodo priestess is with her,
And a miniature flying thing attempts murder,
She is vanished into the night,
Our Mona Lisa of the cybersphere.

IV.

Its� my senior year of high school,
I am working as a board operator,
At Niagara�s Energy 1440,
Passing out in the booth from Tequila,
Waking up with a Depeche Mode shirt full of Fire Extinguisher Foam.

Scott is around,
We play chess and order pizzas,
While he learns to operate the boards,
And we listen to CFNY,
And punk and industrial CD�s in the studio,

He and Brian write Travel Nebraska,
A deck of cards brings us a game of Scat (31).

I�ve been coding on IBM�s at my day co-op with EDS.
Writing in Quickbasic,
Documenting in Wordperfect 5.1,
I own an XT clone,
And Sensenet is colored World War IV.

I read into the goggles,
The world starts translating,
Through the eyes of a bicycle courier,
In all of the vistas of nightclub holograms,

Barry Rydell is a Knoxville Skip Trace,
In pursuit of the Quicksilver Teen.
The elevator�s open and close,
As the packages are delivered to the unwititng parties,
In the urban jungle of the San Fransisco night.

V.

I am visiting Scott at Jamie�s in a Shortsville bar,
This is shotgun wedding town,
And she is legally blind and Albino,
They buy onion rings and beers,
In the only bar in town.

Where a Harley Davidson,
Is up for auction in a sweepstakes,
They slept together noisily long into the darkness of the night.
And I finished Virtual Light in one seamless sitting.

I have already worked concert security,
For Fishbone, The Barenaked Ladies, and The Femmes,
I have already heard 2 unlimited at Nitrous 013.
I have lost my fiance� and been blown away by a blond Shelby,

I have been through my first voyages,
Into lysurgic delerium and met the Brits,
And reached the pinnacle,
And tried to write is all down as Wizz.

I have sat steeped in the Jackal Caf�,
And combatted the Red Headed Stepchild,
The world is a blaze of chess,
And bagels, and coffee, and beer.

I have sat cross legged on the floor in Allentown,
And beat the Bongo in the smoky opium den,
And had my fortune told by the gypsies,
And experienced the wonders of Chinese noodles and Hot and Sour.

Virtual Venice rises up around Chia Pet McKenzie,
And the music of Lo-Rez Skyline pulsates,
Daisy makes her a mule as she is entering Tokyo,
The land of Idoru, the idol singer.

The land is laid out before my ocular traces,
The toe-cutter meets Colin Laney in the Metamorphosis theme bar,
Everything has been re-built in nanotech,
The unbrellas just �go away.�

Rez is trying to make the hologram AI whole,
The Gomi-Otaku are within the Fortress Gates working furiously,
For a solution that their dream of marriage might be realized.

VI.

The scene : Bankrupt and mentally disturbed,
I walk the streets trying to sell credit bought swatches,
Searching for the impossible dream,
I am housed in a hospital for 3 months,
Fighting a legal battle to prove my sanity,
My parents testify against me.

When I recover I work as a cashier,
In a computer retailer,
Stocking shelves, performing inventories, greeting customers with a
smile,
I wear the mask and earn,
Enough money to cancel the hospital debt legally.

I leave work and go back to school,
In addition to my programming classes,
I take creative writing and literature,
In 1997 I am invited to Florida and Disney World with friends.

I ride the neck breaking Tower of Terror,
I see the miracles of Kodak 3-D photography,
I learn how behind the times the exhibits really are,
In the relaxation and shade of the condo in Daytona I re-read Idoru.

Silencio�s hands move like lightening,
In the shadow of the Golden Gate bridge,
People are living up there now,
And an assassin is moving among them in Grey,

Laney is living in a cardboard box,
Jacked in in a terminal,
The Dukes of Nuke�em are playing,
While Boomzilla takes watch on a mini-mart,

The Idoru�s dream is realized but limited,
Barry Rydell is in the mix ordering wings,
The nano-confectioners are coming in Big Dragon,
And the surveillance is everywhere.

VII.

Thanks to the inspiration of Bartleby the Scrivener and Moby,
I am studying Pre-law, Latin, and Ethics at the University,
I earned my Computer Science Degree in 1998,
I find a girlfriend for the first time since 1993.

We spend time around Buffalo and the Casino,
And take a walk up Yonge in Toronto,
We order bad Chinese takeout in Scarborough from our hotel,
I previously saw the musical RENT.

Alone on a bus tour,
We go to her ex-boyfriend�s wedding,
I meet her sister,
Who has also dated him.

At her prompting I take a full time job,
I work as a telecommunications billing specialist,
My car�s engine died,
I am locked into 60 payments of 385.21.
It�s a new Blackberry Saturn with Air Conditioning.

I lose her to the internet,
In my commitment to work,
All of the places we enjoyed,
Become my haunts.

The Saturn takes me to New York,
On a mindbender of a journey,
The battery dies in Pennsylvania,
While I am communing with the spirit world.

The police look up my record,
And I am locked up in a hospital in Harrisburg,
Somehow they let me keep my job,
Must have been my record on the Quality scorecard.

My friends at work barely notice I�ve been gone,
I tell them that I suffer from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

While I am out of work on a leave,
Due to an auto injury to my spinal column,
The Verizon layoffs come,
My entire team is dismantled.

I go back to school with my friend Mike,
Business and Personal Finance.

The job fare is loud and noisy,
I am hired to provide internet technical support,
For broadband powerlink service,
I trade the scratched Saturn in for a new Red Mustang.

It is 2002, the Y2K Bug had no impact.

America is planning to go to war with IRAQ,
I quit my job,
Daniel Pearl is found dead,
With no income I register for school.

I plan to study Digital Media,
The Atmosphere is no better,
I don�t enjoy the simplistic subject matter,
I write four articles for the student newspaper,

A review of Pattern Recognition,
Rap Meets Anime,
Vote With Your Voice,
Tampa Bay Hammers Oakland.

My friend Scott returns from North Carolina,
I begin writing again,
And reading American Literature,
And composing from it.

The Blue Ant Cell rings in my pocket,
Cayce is being tormented by the Michellin Man,
Asian Sluts are finding their way into her locked flat,
She has a footage fetish.

The Kiss is on Bigends mind,
The guerilla market is a global theater,
Russian war movies are shot in the Ukraine,
Jappanese wiccans decipher stego,
A claymore mine is displayed in a shrapnel diagram.

Custom made porn is delivered,
Keystrokes are sniffed,
A developer is identified,
Oil production is in the Texas Mechanism,
Russian Hallucinogenics Spike hard water.

Another helicopter rescues the heroine,
A car collides with a taxi,
The occupants remain unnaccounted for,
On Christopher St.

There�s got to be a sequel.

I obsess about Milan Kundera. In particular, Identity, Immortality, and The Book of Laughter & Forgeting. I'm convinced he's superHuman in some capacity.

Auster, Kundera, Faulkner, and T.S. Elliot would have to be on the list. Potential future candidates are Pynchon (ask me again after I tackle Gravity's Rainbow) and De Lillo. On the lighter side, I can't get enough of David Sedaris. But I know, I know, that's not lit.

John Crowley. Aegypt is my favorite book.

My head belongs to William S. Burroughs
Philip K. Dick
Kurt Vonnegut

My heart belongs to Ray Bradbury
Stephen King

My soul belongs to Joseph Campbell
Nick Bantock
(the guy who wrote – Tao of Pooh)

I occasionally become obsessed with
Neil Gaiman
Angela Carter

Ursula K. LeGuin
Connie Willis
Gaiman
Jane Austen
the Bronte sisters
Dorothy Parker

Hemingway

At least for the moment, My obsessions tend to change frequently.

Previously obsessed with

Anatole Broyard
Henry Miller
Tom Robbins
Hunter S. Thompson

Er, I'm only going to list living authors I'm obssessed with otherwise this list might go on for pages ;-)

Lucius Shepard
Samuel Delany
Anne Carson
Carole Maso
Amelie Nothomb
Susan Sontag
Jeff VanderMeer
Marie Darrieussecq
Thomas Pynchon
Robert Coover
Beryl Bainbridge
Janice Galloway
Farnoosh Moshiri
Kelly Link
Lisa Tuttle
Tahar Ben Jelloun
Adam Zagajewski
Roberto Calasso
A.S. Byatt
Francesca Lia Block

My obsessions are very much prone to change, but I know I can always rely on:

Hunter S. Thompson
Neil Gaiman (sorry, another one)
William Burroughs
Alan Moore
Kurt Vonnegut
Jeff Noon
William Goldman
the Brothers Grimm

Depending, of course, on the sort of mood I'm in.

Leslie Marmon Silko
Isabel Allende
Toni Morrison
thomas pynchon
Faulkner
g.g. Marquez
Flannery O'connor
momaday
alice walker
barbara kingsolver

I have so many obsessions. Once I read something I like I have to read everything written by each author.
Current favorites include:
Jeanette Winterson
Colette
Hakuri Murakami
Angela Carter
Donna Tart
Jeffrey Eugenides
Alice Seabold
Sarah Waters
Michael Pollan

I must say I can't get enough of that crackpot genius, Philip K. Dick. I also have quite a sweet tooth for the heroic fiction of the Irish writer, Morgan Llewelyn.

Gabriel García Márquez, he won the nobel for 100 years of soitude, but my favorite is No One Speaks to the General Anymore.

Any author who can put a joke on every page; for example Cervantes.

Hasta la huego, Don Barce

as much as i love "american psycho" (& i do. i would put it at one of the 10 great novels (maybe 5) of the last 40/50 years (oh, junky/wm s burroughs; wide sargasso sea/jean rhys; play it as it lays/joan didion, more) i would have to say that

"cain's book" by alex trocchi is my favorite novel. & i loved it long before any of these alex trocchi flimfims came around, long before he began showing up in my fashion magazines.

but if i were to name an author w/ whose work i am obsessed i would have to say

paul celan

the greatest poet of the second half of the 20th century & a river suicide. he watched his mother get killed by a shot to the neck in, i believe, a concentration camp. i guess i should read his biography again, to get the precise details. i believe he could not understand why he survived; his family stayed in germany so he could continue at medical school.....

most of his poems are short, but not his most famous:

Todesfugue (Deathfugue)

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening
we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink
we shovel a grave in the air there you won't lie too cramped
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margareta
he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are all sparkling
he whistles his hounds to come close
he whistles his Jews into rows has them shovel a grave in the ground
he commands us play up for the dance

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at morning and midday we drink you at evening
we drink and we drink
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margareta
your ashen hair Shulamith we shovel a grave in the air there you won't lie too cramped
He shouts jab this earth deeper you lot there you others sing up and play
he grabs for the rod in his belt he swings it his eyes are so blue
jab your spades deeper you lot there you others play on for the dancing

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at midday and morning we drink you at evening
we drink and we drink
a man lives in the house your goldenes Haar Margareta
your aschenes Haar Shulamith he plays with his vipers
He shouts play death more sweetly this Death is a master from Deutschland
he shouts scrape your strings darker you'll rise then as smoke to the sky
you'll have a grave then in the clouds there you won't lie too cramped

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at midday Death is a master aus Deutschland
we drink you at evening and morning we drink and we drink
this Death is ein Meister aus Deutschland his eye it is blue
he shoots you with shot made of lead shoots you level and true
a man lives in the house your goldenes Haar Margarete
he looses his hounds on us grants us a grave in the air
he plays with his vipers and daydreams
der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein aschenes Haar Shulamith

tr. John Felstiner

I can't get enough of

Terry Pratchett - read every DiscWorld book and most of his
other stuff.

Neil Gaiman - even got the key to hell tattooed on my leg

Orson Scott Card - Man creates such awesome life like characters
such as in Ender's series, Alvin Maker series,
and Stone Tables.

Alan Moore - guys a case, but an awesome writer. Does a lot of
Graphic novels.

Christopher Moore - Very funny dude. Read Lamb: The Gospels
According to Biff, Christ's childhood pal.

Shel Silverstein - man was a god.

(Adult) lifelong obsession with Fernando Pessoa. He gets a series of "mosts" with me: most creative, most prolific, most engaging, most attuned to being human, and on and on it goes.

I wish Jamaica Kincaid were more prolific. Her writing is so finely crafted and beautiful I feel like I'm imbibing her sentences rather than simply reading a very good story. Salman Rushdie is similar -- so skilled at crafting sentences I can sometimes spend a few minutes in awe not just at what was said, but how it was said.

All three exemplify what Mallarme suggested when he wrote: "In reading, a lonely quiet concert is given to our minds; all our mental faculties will be present in this symphonic exaltation."

Toni Morrison, Georges Bataille, Susan Sontag, Colson Whitehead, Victor Lavalle, Octavia Butler

Vladimir Nabokov. Jose Saramago. Kobo Abe. Paul Auster is coming in from behind.

Absolutely Ted Hughes. I have not seen another poet who captures his clear depiction of nature in a, in my eyes, perfectly crafted literary form.

His verse translation of Ovid is the closet to the Latin that I have ever seen.

Tim Powers. (With all the Gaiman fans here, I'm stunned that no one else has mentioned him before). Start with The Anubis Gates, I'd say. Then read them all.

:-)

Norman Mailer
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Dave Sim
Warren Ellis
Douglas Coupland

I love Milorad Pavic, Charlotte Perkins Gillman, Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Edgar Allen Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, and Andrew Vachss.

hmmm....

steinbeck
phillip k. dick
frank herbert (but NOT his son)
abbey hoffman
vonnegut

and i LOVE to read and reread eldridge cleaver's "soul on ice" and tolkiens "lord of the rings"

Henry Miller
Paul Bowles
James Joyce
William Blake
Robert Desnos
Paul Valery
Paul Eluard
Andre Breton
Anais Nin
Deleuze
Derrida
Levinas
Said
Vaslav Nijinsky

Tanith Lee
Erika Lopez
Neil Gaiman
David Sedaris
Saul Williams

William Blake- do poets count? ;^) I made a tribe for him even.

Victor Hugo, my favorite author.

Mark Helprin. For some reason, and without fail, his stories make me want to throw my television out the window, and run off to live in some snow-bound ice hovel in Canada. Oh, and have a torrid love affair with an Italian peasant at the same time. Strange, but if you've ever read "A Soldier of the Great War" or "Winter's Tale," you know what I mean.

And what an interesting man; It's hard for me to understand how someone can be so coldly rational (and outspoken) in his political and militaristic positions, and yet obsessed with beauty and poetry. Still trying to figure it out.

Keats, definitely Keats.

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time...


Anon rush'd by the bright Hyperion;
His flaming robes stream'd out beyond his heels,
And gave a roar, as if of earthly fire,
That scared away the meek ethereal hours
And made their dove wings tremble. On he flared.

Obsessed is a REALLY high standard.

That said:

VIRGINIA WOOLF!

Banana Yoshimoto, especially "Asleep"

Tennyson

Milton (Paradise Lost)

Jhumpa Lahiri (after reading "The Namesake" I'm fiending for more)

That's a good start.

From the list, Woolf is my favorite, but I'd probably recommend Banana Yoshimoto to someone I didn't know. Her style is so lucid and clear, yet so moving. Woolf takes more of a commitment, but like any relationship, you end up getting more out of it.

I'm going to take obsession to mean I return to their work over and over again, even if I've read it about a hundred times already.

Lionel Shriver, especially "Female of the Species"- I used to pick this book up daily and read from it like a bible. Messed up, yes. I got to the point where I knew where the passages with punch were and would refer to them in my mind. "Game Control" and "A Perfectly Good Family" were also excellent. These were the first books I ran into that I couldn't read all at once, I had to pick them up and read, digest and read some more.

Tanith Lee, just cool weird sci-fi fantasy.

I'm sure there's more, these are just the two that came immediately to mind.

Tom Robbins, James Baldwin, Albert Camus, Dante Alighieri, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Steinbeck, Balzac, Chuck Palahniuk, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nikos Kazantzakis, Constantine Cavafy, Rainer Maria Rilke, William James, Marcel Proust, Vonnegut, Voltaire....the list could go on and on..but thos are my latest reads and aquisitions.

have an unnaturally complete collection: Ward Just, AS. Byatt
obsessive cultural fixation: Pynchon
the voices in my head: Nabokov esp. Ada or Ardor
the songs in my dreams: Paul Bowles, D. H. Lawrence
makes my friends shake their heads: William Vollman
secret obsession: John LeCarre
keep buying copies of books to give away: Bruce Chatwain esp Songlines
stolen from my neighbour because he is obsessed: Robert D. Kaplan
bought obsessively for my daughter: Maurice Sendek, Roald Dahl
quote inappropriately: Milton, T.S. Eliot
Use like the I Ching: Emily Dickenson __www.logopoeia.com/ed/__
(if you want “change” lines, search for the whole poem)

I am a big fan of Nelson Algren. There was a time when it was Hubert Selby who was my cup of tea and while I still like him, I just really enjoy Algren's 'sketches' of people a lot more.

I discovered Selby in high school and while I had read a lot of ....er...GRITTY material before, I was not prepared for the world of Harry Black, Harry White, et al. I scoffed at Wm Burroughs as a whiny brat after digesting The Room and The Demon.

P

I'm a Jane Austen devotee- her work changed my life and had a HUGE impact on shaping me as a teenager. Same with the Brontes (Charlotte in particular), Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde. Edgar Allen Poe will always be dear to me. Virginia Woolf is a recent obsession. Sci-fi and fantasy- wise I love Marion Zimmer Bradley, Elizabeth Haydon, Anne McCaffrey, and Alice Borchardt.

P G Wodehouse. I love many of the authors mentioned here, and Tom Robbins, Vonnegut, O S Card, Neal Stephenson and Hunter Thompson will always be a part of who I am, but as far as obsession goes, it's the Bach of the language, Wodehouse. How's that for nerdly?

Neil Gaiman, for his wonderful imagination, and Tad Williams, because I can't wait for the next thing to happen in _Otherworld.

Patrick O'Brian, the Aubrey/Maturin books, big obsession.

And Bill Watterson, genius.

Nabokov and Lewis Carroll.
Flannery O'Connor and Robert Louis Stevenson rate high too.
Love Shakespeare's tragedies too.
M

Dalai Lama, Mary Gordon, Mary Gaitskill, Chuck Palahniuk, Christopher Moore (not so obsessed now after reading his last few so-so books)

Poetry is my main crave--authors at the top--May Sarton
Yevtushenko (Eulogy to New York--fabulous!)
Rich and Rilke, Bukowski and a very long list!

Fiction: Heinlein, Tolkein, Marilyn French

Interestingly enough--I love The Womens Room--but I have friends who cannot read it--hits too close too home. An ex-boyfriend burned it--I had parts memorized--so what whas the point.

Another poignantly sad book written in prose that is more poetry--gorgeous decriptions--
is "Good Housekeeping"--and I promptly forgot the author

Thomas Wolfe--he paints visual tapestries with his words.

Light Fiction: I try to avoid. Kinda like TV--I try to put something worthwhile in my head.

Kate