Inspiration from Other Blogs

I was just perusing the latest addition from Stuck in a Book. They are answering questions regarding favorite authors and it definitely got me thinking. My favorite authors have changed over the years and I think it is interesting how tastes can change; are they reflections of my life at the time? are they evolutions? All I can fathom is that, well...I'm not entirely sure! I tried to answer the questions that were on that blog and I was unable to do so and so instead I have just ambled on about my favorite authors.

The books that have changed my life are so countless it would be boring to list them all here. Let me burden you with a few though, just for fun!

I first read Jane Austen when I was little. I can remember being in the store with my mother when she bought them for me: Persuasion, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, and Pride and Prejudice. I fell in love with that period. I still have it etched in my mind. What I would give to be Elizabeth Bennett! Especially if Colin Firth were my Darcy!

Naturally, next I must write about the Bronte's! When I was in Haworth a few years back, I was struck by how simple and isolated their lives must have been and suddenly had a new appreciation for their work! Ms. Jane Eyre what your inspiration must have felt like!

Next, would be during high school, when I found Jack Kerouac! Oh the freedom of his spontaneous prose! I romanticized the act of hitchhiking until the reality of the dangers fell back into my mind. I still read his books and can't put them down. I'll place Allen Ginsberg in this paragraph too! Howl made my heart quake. It is Walt Whitman for the rest of us in the real and untranscendental realm!

I have to put Meave Binchy in here too! I know it's just fluff but my God that woman is one hell of a story teller! I picture her weeble self reading her stories to me while I sit at her knee in a quiet country kitchen!

In university I found my love of stream of consciousness. William Faulkner's Sound and Fury and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse are brilliant. I find solace in knowing that everyone else's mind is as erratic as my own!

I read Jodi Pocoult's My Sister's Keeper and have recommended it to EVERYONE! I can't get over the depth of her characters. All parents try to do their best and this brought that fact into my mind in a startling manner.

Martin Amis's Times Arrow is still one of my all time favorites! Everyone has heard the rumors that at your death your life will flash before your eyes...but what if it goes in reverse!? The greatest things in your life will look like atrocities and vice versa!

If you haven't read any of these authors or if you haven't read any of these books PLEASE pick them up! They truly are lovely, thought provoking, and just plain brilliant!

In re-reading this post, I realize what an eclectic bunch this is!