| 1. Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf has also been an important writer to me. For many years To the Lighthouse was my favorite novel. I also love Mrs. Dalloway. Woolf once said that we don’t believe in plot anymore, and at a certain point in my life I needed to be reassured that I did not have to have plot — that I could write stories that were largely matters of sensibility. Here I was, wanting to be a writer and I knew no plots, and Woolf helped me. |
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| 2. George Eliot My favorite George Eliot is Middlemarch. It has a complexity about it that I admire. But my heart is really more moved by The Mill on the Floss |
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| 3. Flannery O’Connor I love many of O’Connor’s short stories, but two of my favorites are “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” in a collection by the same title and , “Good Country People,” the story of “the Misfit” in the collection A Good Man is Hard to Find. To me, O’Connor stands for the New South: the transition between the world of Faulkner and the world that we live in. That period where race was talked about in terms of racism and people’s reluctance to change. The fact that she wrote about a world familiar to me was wonderful. Although O’Connor is a very spiritual writer, she’s also a comic writer. And I loved her self consciously letting people utter the clichés that so many people swear by. That really just tickled all of my ribs to read that part of her work. She was a devout Roman Catholic and she tried to enter into the world of grace and mystery and the wonder of how it is possible to redeem us miserable human beings to a certain extent. I found all of that fascinating about her. She was a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and since I, too, went to school there, I felt a link with her. But really it was her comic genius and her honesty that appeal to me so much. |
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| 4. Katherine Anne Porter There’s a wonderful story called Pale Horse, Pale Rider. It’s actually about the flu epidemic of 1918, and it’s just beautifully written. She has a novella called Noon Wine, an atypical novella for her that’s about the difficulty of achieving justice in an imperfect world. It’s set on a farm in Texas. |
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| 5. Leo Tolstoy For 10 or 15 years before To the Lighthouse occupied the throne in my pantheon of novels, my favorite book was Anna Karenina. I loved it because of the complexity of the psychology in it. Tolstoy was able to show how strengths and weaknesses in a single individual are related to each other. Anna, being a very warm person but not finding warmth in her marriage, thought that she could find it outside her marriage. That strength of her love of warmth and intimacy really caused her to make bad mistakes in what to do with herself — not that she had much choice because the position of women was so confined at that time. But I loved the number of complex characters that Tolstoy was able to develop in Anna Karenina. I liked it a good bit better than War and Peace for that reason. It seemed as though he achieved greater character complexity. |
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| 6. Toni Morrison Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved was highly inspiring to me. |
. In that one, the character Maggie Tulliver is like Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, one with a great deal of warmth and perhaps not the best judgment because of her need for intimacy. Like Anna, she is trapped by the limits of her world, yet she has a very expansive soul. I like the scope of Maggie Tulliver’s life — the child who ran off to be with the gypsies. She was a creature who followed her heart, but she was intelligent as well.Finally, four more authors I love:
7. Jane Austen
8. Charles Dickens
9, 10, and 11. The Brontës (Charlotte, Emily, and Anne)
Go for it ! Get out there and do something you love !
Use the internet. Here is a site I found.
http://www.bnbfinder.com/positionsAvailable.php
Most B&B are seasonal and offer housing, so you will get a chance to see if you like it. Wi
Hi, Lisa: I will most certainly share my story of a billboard when I do it, LOL, LOL....After 36 years of abusive marriage, a childhood of abuse, and a church who "trashed" me, I am more than ready for a healthy relationship.
I wrote about m
The pain certainly didn't feel good to me. Understanding why we are the way we are is a good thing. When I was 12 I got food poisioning..Ecoli..my Dad had planned a fishing trip for months..my Mom told him I was too sick to go..he said she has ruined
I hope you like the results you get. I am still using it since this original post from a couple of months ago. I am quite pleased. I have tried & discarded enough cosmetics to stock a small store. LOL
Great list. My favorite writers include: Ray Bradbury, Alice Hoffman, Julia Glass, David Sedaris, John Irving, John Steinbeck, Alice Walker…just to name a few!
Sena,
Have you seen the movie The Last Station? After having read War and Peace and Anna Karenina, I found this movie fascinating! And the beauty of the Russian landscape is just gorgeous! Robert Frost would have liked to see the Birch Trees lining the forests.