No reason, no order, my favorites: Barbara Pym Iris Murdoch Donald Westlake Anthony Powell Trollope Dickens James Rachel Cusk Ivy Compton-Burnett Wodehouse Rex Stout Ellis Peters Dorothy Dunnett Tolstoy Penelope Fitzgerald Alvaro Mutis Joseph Conrad George Eliot Portis Bolaño
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I wish I could be as lovingly funny as Barbara Pym. I wish I could portray the abandon of heedless love like Iris Murdoch I wish I could write with the clarity and concision of Donald Westlake. I wish I could understand the long arc of human life like Anthony Powell.
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I wish I could grasp the interaction of the social & the personal like Trollope. I wish I could write with the verbal verve of Dickens. I wish I could shade motivation and emotion like Henry James. I wish I could cut like Rachel Cusk. I wish I could kill like Ivy Compton-Burnett.
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I wish I could balance sentences and find perfect the word like Wodehouse. I wish I could create a world as welcoming as Rex Stout. I wish I could convey the quiet of a lost world like Ellis Peters. I wish I could make historical info live like Dorothy Dunnett.
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I wish I knew what Tolstoy knew about people. I wish I could achieve the gentle asperity of Penelope Fitzgerald. I wish I could mix weariness and enchantment like Alvaro Mutis. I wish I had as clear a sense of honor and individual responsibility as Joseph Conrad.
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Replying to @levistahl
I love Alvaro Mutis! I can't take him 100% seriously though, he's so marinated in male intellectual self-pity--kind of like Bridget Jones Diary but for male intellectuals, and without the laffs. But sometimes I want that, need that!
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Replying to @ChaseMadar
Yeah, there's definitely a male quality to Mutis that's unavoidable, and a sense in which the world-weariness is all ultimately a joke. But lord, when I am in the mood, there's no one like him.
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Replying to @levistahl @ChaseMadar
Re-reading Conrad after reading Mutis was really interesting: I knew Mutis had lifted his milieu from Conrad, but I hadn't realized how closely he was also deliberately aping the prose style, but with different aims. It was fascinating.
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would love to know more about Alvaro Mutis himself… the fact that he absconded from Colombia, wanted for embezzling from a big oil company (no?) makes me love him!
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Replying to @ChaseMadar
He wrote a book about his experience in prison that I would love to read, but my Spanish is far too limited. Really curious about it.
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Replying to @levistahl
Yo sí leo español and I want to read this prison memoir! Will report back when I do…
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