My favorite novels
Bob Bly, one of the world’s best copywriters — or at least one of the world’s most influential due to his books on copywriting — posted a list of his 10 favorite novels (and one play). That made me think about the novels, poetry, and plays that had a big influence on me and my writing style. My criteria was that the books had to be ones that I loved at the time, reread several times, and which I still love now. So here’s my list, organized the time period in which I first read them: Childhood Where the Wild Things Are The Winnie the Pooh books Teens Watership Down Dune (the 3-part series) Pickwick Papers College The Sun Also Rises Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Hamlet (and pretty much all Shakespeare) Poetry by William Blake, Keats, Byron, Yeats, and T.S. Eliot The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Joseph Conrad’s short stories (especially those narrated by “Marlow,” including Youth and Heart of Darkness) The Plague Post college/Adulthood War and Peace Master and Margarita Catch-22 The Importance of Being Earnest Arms and the Man A Confederacy of Dunces These are books that I’ve read and reread many times — and will probably do so again. Though I’m not sure about the Dune series. Also, I reread Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man a few years ago and was totally bored by it; the writing is great, but I just didn’t care about Stephen Dedalus anymore and didn’t understand why the novel spoke to me so deeply when I was younger. I notice several things about this list: I like books that start with a “W” I like humor, especially irony and wit (another “W”) I like adventure Most of all, this helps me see that I’m drawn to a certain writing style, which you can find in Winnie the Pooh and Watership Down all the way through to War and Peace. It’s the “high” style, a style which is direct and clear, but has a high level of diction. Which novels, poetry, and plays have had the most influence on you as a...
read more