The LL&L Rumpus Room

Wally Lamb's always been able to impress me with his writing. He's a general fiction author who deals a lot with psychology. He always gives his characters a ton of problems to deal with. Some critics of his work say he writes his plots like a soap opera, but I think that's what draws me into his characters. They behave like normal people would in a soap opera scenario. In the end, I think it's the drama that feeds my guilty pleasure and the character's reactions to the drama that makes me really enjoy his work.

Sophie Kinsella is another author I have a guilty indulgence for. She writes chick lit, her characters aren't great or anything. But there's something in her prose that makes me laugh, and it's difficult to make a reader laugh when all you have is text. I appreciate her sort of clean-cut humor and the general fun I get out of reading her novels.

Barabara Kingsolver is another great writer. She really hooked me with her novel, The Bean Trees. From there, I read The Poisonwood Bible, a novel I read a few months ago but I'm still thinking about today. She has a talent for writing in multiple points of view for a variety of characters and fleshing them out as individuals. She also has a wonderful way with words and uses them effectively in describing scenery, emotion, and action.

Then there's Margaret Atwood. Her prose annoyed me at first, but it's grown on me since. Her characters are a little flat at first too, but they evolve well and take some digging to get into. The same can be said for her style of writing, but the plots are intricate and deep and I usually can't stop when I start reading something by her. There's just so many different interpretations you can have when you read one of her novels, and I enjoy books like that.

Philip K. Dick is another one I always forget to mention. He's an old school sci-fi writer who wrote the novel that inspired the movie, Bladerunner. I've only read one of his novels, but I really enjoyed how he wrote a story that had deep emotional and ethical implications and still managed to write about electric animals and lead codpieces.

I should probably also mention William Gibson for another sci-fi writer. I hate his style of writing, but his story and the issues he brings up within them are quite excellent and his prose does serve a purpose to his message. I started off reading Pattern Recognition, and I'm now trying to slog through Neuromancer. It takes a lot of patience to go through his novels, but I feel it's worth it for the brain food alone. I also like bringing him up after I mention Sophie Kinsella because they're two authors from two completely different spectrums.

It's interesting how little fantasy I read considering the genre I write in most of the time.