First Came Vonnegut

We cannot all read every novel, nor can we write every novel. All we can do is read what we love and write what we know. Thinking back to authors I've loved, Laura Ingalls Wilder will always be the author that piqued my interest in reading in the first place. After that, as my reading tastes matured, things changed.

Kurt Vonnegut was at the peak of his writing career when I was in high school. I read all his novels. Cynic, skeptic, able to look unflinchingly at the human condition. My kind of guy.

Next came Tom Robbins, a local fellow, funny in the same way as Vonnegut, but a little lighter. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues always brings back memories of my post high school vintage apartment replete with the fumes of unburnt natural gas.

Later I switched to Larry McMurtry, starting with Lonesome Dove. Never could look at carrots in quite the same way after that book. Was shocked but impressed to find out McMurtry penned Terms of Endearment. Only man I've read who wrote just like a woman. That's a compliment.

When I discovered Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, I found a kindred spirit in the characters and their lives with a preacher for a father, and a mother who went along with a life of sacrifice shared with children who did not choose it.

Likewise when I first read Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees, it was so gratifying to find a second female writer who could describe great human suffering without ever abandoning the reader in that place of pain.

Nick Hornby came later. I first saw High Fidelity in movie form. Later, when I read the book, it reminded me of all that cannot be captured in a mere two hours, the narrative unique to the author, inside the head of the protagonist, much of which is lost on film.

Because I was cursed with probably some sort of undiagnosed dyslexia, I'm a slow reader. What I've had to do with that is wait for the very best to come along and read that at my own pace. It's given me a taste for literary fiction.

As I look at the list of my favorites, something else stands out. Voice. Voice is what stands out. Characters who could not stay silent, stories that had to be told, and had to be told in that one unmistakable voice.

Something to think about.

More later.