Some good writers from Vonnegut and DeLillo's generation include Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon (difficult but worth it), Saul Bellow, and John Updike (haven't read him but many people love him). Some young, contemporary writers I enjoy include Junot Diaz and Jhumpa Lahiri. Jonathan Safran Foer is good, too, but I've only enjoyed about half the things he's written.
Countless thanks to you all for your help and patience. Thirdwind you reminded me of John Updike, so I just purchased my father's tears and other stories. Ed thanks, I looked into Goodbye Columbus, it got me interested. Mamammia, thanks for catching my english mistake (probably amongst many) and for you encouragement. cerebral, thanks
His most famous work is Rabbit, Run, which is a novel. It's actually the first novel in a tetralogy. So if you're looking for some Updike novels, I would start with that.
If you liked reading philosophy, I would highly, highly, highly recommend the novels of G.K. Chesterton. My favorites are Manalive and The Man Who Was Thursday. The Ball and the Cross will also give you a good bit to think on. Chesterton was also an essayist, poet, and social critic. Lots of his works are on Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/80 (What's Wrong with the World is also a brilliant analysis of the social conditions of our time, in spite of its having been written nearly 100 years ago, but you wanted fiction, so I gave you fiction.)
Maybe consider some Tom Clancy novels? I preferred his earlier works like The Hunt for Red October or Red Storm Rising. Military History, WW II era, which isn't exactly fiction but well written and interesting: Citizen Soldier by Stephen E Ambrose and Iron Coffins: A Personal Account Of The German U-boat Battles Of World War II by Herbert Werner. The US Civil War era: The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara. A classic post apocalyptic novel: Alas Babylon by Pat Frank And a wildcard that you might enjoy: The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom
I had meant to include Red October on my list, because in it Clancy is somewhat less obsessed with military hardware than in his later works (although if you really want a good layman's explanation for how a nuclear weapon functions, The Sum of All Fears is a good choice).
Too late. I'd recommend Hemingway for sentence structure and conciseness. Alan Dean Foster's "Midworld" for imagery. Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull for thought provoking simplicity.
And nothing after about Executive Orders or maybe Rainbow Six. Without Remorse though... That was a gem.
I love to read. Always have. Like most readers, I get lost in books. Magic lies between those pages. Or so I thought. But lately I've been looking at the books I read from a different perspective. I'm still interested in the stories, sort of, but I'm more curious about the author's tricks of telling the story. For example, with the book I'm currently reading, I keep noticing how the author is "showing" and not "telling." He goes into detail about minor facial expressions in order to get the character's feelings across and avoids filtering words most of the time. So I notice this and I think, "Oh, by talking about the character's arched eyebrows, the author is trying to show me that the character feels surprised." Stuff like that, only a bit more complicated. So I'm looking at how the author decided to tell the story instead of really getting lost in the story. I'm inspecting his choices and trying to learn from them. It's like watching a play but thinking about the costume and lighting choices instead of the story being played out. Or looking at a drawing and thinking about how many times the artist had to erase before that hand finally looked realistic instead of trying to figure out what the drawing means overall. This is both good and bad. It's good for my writing because I don't usually read books from this perspective. I'm picking up techniques. It's bad for the magic. Call me naive, but I thought stories were like magic, to some degree. They magically flowed out of the creator's head and they magically connect with their audience. Instead it's starting to feel like a series of tricks. The author is creating the illusion that it's easy, when in reality he had to pick up all these skills over years of practice and he now has to make very conscious decisions about exactly how he wants to express things. And these skills he learned are skills that almost any person could pick up if they worked at it. The story doesn't even have to be that great, as long as the writer knows all the tricks and how to implement them. I should be relieved by the revelation that these skills can be learned. That it's not magic. (And I do still believe to some degree that creativity does come from some lovely, magical place that no one can quite pinpoint. Creativity is practically synonymous with magic, in my head.) But part of me is sad. I have a strong desire to re-read all my favorite books to watch how all the magic breaks down and is proven to be very conscious choices made by the author. "She wrote this to set the scene. She wrote that to show how the character felt about this. She specifically wrote that so she could move the story forward. And so forth." It becomes too concrete. Too obvious. I know what the author was thinking, and I don't like it. It does make other author's seem more like me, and me feel more like I could one day be them, but... I feel like I just found out Santa Clause wasn't real, and I'm not so happy about that. I might never read books the same way again.
For me it doesn't, not if it's a good story and well written. I get caught up in the story and the mechanics of telling it fade to the back. That doesn't mean I don't read and study how an author put a good story together. Usually I do that after I've enjoyed the story. It tells me they did something right and worth paying attention to after the first read.
For me it does. I can see the foreshadowing in advance, and anything that may not be as well written is now unreadable. It kind of sucks, but at the same time it's informative into what I'm doing right and wrong.
So, please hear my next few comments the right way, because you are clearly on the right path. A lot of writers start at a place similar to the one described as your starting point. It's all magic and vaguely holy, nothing should be altered from what flows divinely from the writer's pen like Galadriel pouring water into her looking bowl. In a word, it's a bit precious in the British sense of that word. You should be relieved to know these things can be learned because now you see that it's application and practice, and that means it's achievable in a practical sense. BTW, your revelation is the reason I tell people that giving critique is so much more productive than getting critique. You can have all the things in the world pointed out to you, but until you learn to see them for yourself, you can only react, not act.
Everything looks like magic to the untrained eye. WTF is Floyd Mayweather doing? Well, he didn't just roll out of bed one day and decide to get into the ring. It just looks like that to us. Professionals suffer so that the customers don't have to. Unless we're talking about airlines.
I am currently doing exactly this to a book that I love. It only increases my appreciation. Which is weird, because it is a very emotional book and you would think that dissecting every theme the book addresses and every little trick the author plays would turn it from an emotional experience into a dry academic exercise. But in fact the process merely provides more material to absorb with feelings. The trick is to analyze the writing forgivingly -- recognize and appreciate the effective things the author does, but do not dwell on things that make it seem like the author is trying too hard (or not trying hard enough). Take note of the inefficiencies so that you can avoid them in your own writing, but move on from them without letting them affect your opinion of the book you are reading. Move onto the things that can improve your opinion of it. Absolutely true.
I've found that too. I absolutely loved the first five books from a particular author. Can't get into the sixth! I have to try really hard to turn off my inner writer when I'm reading as I find myself thinking "I would not have written that sentence like that ..."
Ahh the magic. For those of us who easily see through the tricks it is not the same, but we can still enjoy the show.. When I wrote the above I imagined the author as a magician, using words as the magician uses their clever hands. But that's not all, it is? A well written book is still magical, transporting and even transforming. Yes, I sometimes think; I would not have written that, or they got this or that wrong. But the test of a good book is still the same; does it take us some place else, make us want to believe? Make us think about the books' world as if it were real long after we have closed it? I still get transported. Sometimes I get kidnapped and when I'm returned to my family at the end of the book I find I am not the same; I have been changed irrevocably. I remember distinctly the first book I analyzed. I read it with passion, I reread it 4 more times to find out how words on a page had made me care so much. I read that book five times back to back. And I enjoyed it
I don't find it detracts, myself. It's just another layer. Analysing books like a writer and reading them for pleasure occupy two different bits of headspace, so it's not hard to keep them separate.
It's just something that happens when you're trying to improve your writing and you hear about all of these different techniques. I find I do get a little bit lost in it, but i don't mind too much about that, really. I can always re read the book later
That's how I know if a book's grabbed my attention or not, if I read it more than once. Most of the books I own, I have read multiple times, some of them, I've lost count but there are four on the shelf that I've started and just can't finish.
I sympathize with the bittersweetness of your situation, but I think you should certainly rejoice that you're "getting it" and learning in the process. If writing is what you want to do and to "one day be them" then I think you're on the right track. I wonder if listening to audio books could help assist in bringing that magic back. You'll be listening to a different voice other than your own, giving emphasis where needed, different tones, etc. ~Chad Lutzke Pre-Author, Post-Boredom - The Literary Unfoldings of a Middle-Aged Dreamer
I can do both. Usually, I just read like a reader, letting the book take me wherever it wants me to go, and I go willingly. If, however, I'm in "analysis mode," I'm fully capable of reading like a writer, observing the use of techniques, evaluating narrative strategies, etc. and generally being aware of how the author "did it." Oddly (I think), I find it harder to watch movies without analyzing them than it is to read novels that way. I'm always analyzing movies - dunno why.
Really!? I'm so glad I'm not the only one who now watches a movie and has constant narration in my head along the lines of 'the door opened and in walked so and so' ... 'he heard the car before he saw it' ... 'he looked at her in a way that made her knees weak' ... and so on
