Writers I Love

One of the good things about being a writer, is that it gives you every excuse to spend hours with your nose buried in books written by others. The following list is a rather miscellaneous collection of authors I love, in alphabetical order. At the moment the list is rather short and skimpy, but I will be adding to it before long…

Paul Auster

I can’t help thinking that highly-praised the New York Trilogy is not by any means his best, but I love Paul Auster’s work.

Auster’s Collected Prose is particularly worth reading. The Faber hardback edition has a very handsome cover, and it contains everything from Auster’s early work, through the Red Notebook to reflections upon the events of September 11 ^th 2001.

It’s also worth catching the two films that Auster scripted – Smoke and Blue in the Face – with Harvey Keitel. I particularly like the latter film.

Donald Barthelme

I have come across Barthelme only recently, but he is an wonderful writer. His short stories may not always be successful, but they are often funny, bizarre, intelligent and highly inventive.

Italo Calvino

Whilst I don’t love everything that Calvino wrote – If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller is a bit too clever for its own good, and The Castle of Crossed Destinies is curiously unsatisfying – Calvino at his best is extraordinarily good.

At heart a fabulist, Calvino is the writer whom I perhaps admire most, both for his extraordinary literary imagination and also for his penetrating insight into the nature of literature itself. His
Six Memos for the Next Millennium gives a beautiful insight into his own approach to literature, and into what literature can be.

Tove Jansson

I spent my childhood reading the moomin books, full of strange, lonely tales saturated by melancholy. I just love all of the moomin books, without exception, although the apocalyptic Comet in Moominland is one of my favourites. Forget the television series and return to the books for an experience of unparalleled strangeness. And the moomins still have the power to reduce me to tears…

Jansson also wrote for adults, and her Summer Book is a similarly haunting read.

Jose Saramago

I first picked up Saramago’s Blindness whilst visiting friends for dinner. They were cooking in the kitchen and I was mooching in their bookshelves. I started the first chapter and, by the time the food was ready, I could hardly tear myself away.

Saramago’s style is unlike that of anybody else. He is a true one-off. If it was possible to win the Nobel prize twice, I would recommend him for a second one, just for the hell of it.

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