15 Authors in 15 Minutes

I posted this as a Facebook note, but I have several Luddite friends who value their privacy too much to sign up.

The Rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen authors (poets included) who've influenced you and that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Tag at least fifteen friends, including me, because I'm interested in seeing what authors my friends choose. (To do this, go to your Notes tab on your profile page, paste rules in a new note, cast your fifteen picks, and tag people in the note.)

I just started typing names and this is what came out in about two minutes. Then I spent nearly an hour typing up commentary. I have read multiple titles for each of the author’s below, which is one of the restrictions I placed on myself.

1. Julio Cortázar (Argentina) – Rayuela is a masterpiece. It’s English translation, Hopscotch, is as well. I think I’m going to reread it over Christmas. His short stories are really cool.

2. Machado de Assis (Brazil) – Dom Casmurro and As memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas are two of the best novels ever written in Latin America, and certainly during the 19th Century. If you’re going to read them in English, go for John Gledson’s translation of DC and Gregory Rabbasa’s of BC. They are both part of the Oxford Series of Latin American Literature.

3. José Saramago (Portugal, Nobel Prize Laureate) – Even though he’s a Portuguese writer, and I know Portuguese pretty well, most of what I’ve read has been in translation. Ensaio sobre a cegueira (Blindness) and Todos os nomes (All the Names) are wonderfully written and changed my perspective on the human condition.

4. Pablo Neruda (Chile, Novel Prize Laureate) – I don’t know if I’ve read everything by Neruda, but pretty darn close.

5. Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina) – Ficciones blew my mind as a junior in my Introduction to Spanish American Literature class. Even after a dozen or so readings, I’m still amazed by the perfection attained in this collection.

6. Regina Rheda (Brazil, USA) – I only heard about her a few months ago but Arca sem Noé - Histórias do Edifício Copan (Stories from the Copan Building) blew me away with it’s conversational prose and insightful character development. I’m also surprised to realize she’s the only woman to make it on the list.*

7. Stephen King (USA) – I started reading King when I was 12 or 13. I believe the first thing I read was either Nightshift, a short story collection, or Salem’s Lot, which scared the bejeebers out of me. My friend, Steve, turned me onto The Dark Tower series when I was 15 and I still love it. I think I’ve been through the whole thing four or five times (we’re talking 3800+ pages! [and there’re another 900+ pages in the new graphic novels]).

8. Cormac McCarthy (USA – Winner of the Pulitzer Prize) – I changed my life after reading The Road and No Country for Old Men. The Border Trilogy is sitting on the shelves in my office. I will get to them soon enough.

9. Kurt Vonnegut (USA) – I read Slaughterhouse-Five on a whim while camping with Dad. I had heard of the title but I had no idea what the book was about. I just knew it was one of those must reads. I loved every minute of it and enjoyed it even more when I recently reread it. I then moved onto Cat’s Cradle and Breakfast of Champions, which I’m now rereading. What should I read next?

10. Robert Kirkman (USA) / Tony Moore (USA) / Charlie Adlard (England) – Shortly after defending my dissertation, I needed to get my mind on something else. I turned to zombies. I heard about The Walking Dead from a friend several years ago (thanks Chris) and with the recent AMC adaptation I thought I would give it a try. I got sucked in and moved on to other zombie related media.

11. Edgar Allan Poe (USA) – I like fantastic literature, some horror fiction, some detective fiction, and almost everything I’ve ever read by Poe. It’s a good thing the French liked him; otherwise, he may not have received the attention he deserved in his own country.

12. Juan Rulfo (Mexico) – Pedro Páramo is still one of the most unsettling books I’ve read. Even though there are ghosts in it, it’s not horror fiction at all. It’s still creepy, though.

13. João Guimarães Rosa (USA) – Grande sertão: veredas, I could spend my entire career researching and publishing on this one novel and it would never be enough. I still don’t understand it but love every moment of it.

14. Shel Silverstein (USA) – Okay, I started thinking about influential authors I read as a kid and the cover to Lafcadio: The Lion Who Shot Back flashed across my mind. I remember reading the whole book at the public library in Green River, WY when I was eight. Now I enjoy reading Where the Sidewalk Ends and The Light in the Attic with my kids.

15. Roald Dahl (England) – Hands down, my favorite author as a kid, and probably still in my top five. His imagination, experimentation with language, and quirky characters inspired a sense of wonder and amazement in my as a child and preteen.

Honorable mentions:
• Fernando Pessoa (should have been on the list but somehow he slipped my mind. Oops.)
• Orson Scott Card (just for Ender’s Game alone)
• Michael Chabon (The Coen Brothers are making an adaptation of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, hurrah!)
• Mark Twain (I probably read all his short stories as a kid, as well as those two books with the N-word in them)
• Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez for Locke and Key (thanks for the recommendation, Mike)
• Gabriel García Márquez (if you only read two books originally written in Spanish, you must read Don Quixote and One Hundred Years of Solitude, you won’t regret it)

* This is partly due to the fact that I mostly read Latin American literature written before the 1970s. Sadly, it was a man’s game and few women were allowed to be part of the club. It still hasn’t changed much. Unfair? Absolutely. Also, I haven’t read multiple titles for many women writers, the exceptions being Gabriela Mistral, Rosario Castellanos, Alfonsina Storni, Clárice Lispector—whose short stories I adore—and some others I’m forgetting. This exercise has shown me that I need to be reading more literature written by women.