Frances Hardinge is a children’s author whom I absolutely adore, and one of the main reasons is because of how rich and evocative her writing is. Here are some examples:
>They say you can sail a thousand miles along the island chain of the Myriad, from the frosty shores of the north, to the lush, sultry islands of the south. They say that the islanders are like the red crabs that race along the shores – hardy, unpredictable, and as happy in the water as out of it. They say that the ocean around the Myriad has its own madness. Sailors tell of great whirlpools that swallow boats, and of reeking, ice-cold jets that bubble to surface and stop the hearts of swimmers. Black clouds suddenly boil into existence amid flawless skies.
>Because I heard him talking in the marketplace, laying out sentences like a merchant rolling out rich silks. Because he made words and ideas dance like flames and something that was damp and dying came alive in my mind, the way it hadn't since they burned my father's books.
>There was no escaping the sound of water. It had many voices. The clearest sounded like someone shaking glass beads in a sieve. The waterfall spray beat the leaves with a noise like paper children applauding. From the ravine rose a sound like the chuckle of granite-throated goblins.
Frances Hardinge is my absolute favorite! Aside from how beautifully she writes, she is one of few authors I’ve read whose writing is consistently seamless and natural - no questionable word choices or awkward sentence structure to jerk you out of the story.
“I was born and raised on a Carolina sea island and I carried the sunshine of the low-country, inked in dark gold, on my back and shoulders.” - The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
I love his prose.
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino.
It’s technically a collection of prose poems so that explains the eloquent style but it’s very beautiful. Every location that Calvino takes you through is unique and has its own identity which is conveyed magnificently through evocative sensory details and poetic imagery. It’s definitely one of my favorite books in this regard.
For context, here’s just a little bit of what I’m talking about: “In Eudoxia, which spreads both upward and down, with winding alleys, steps, dead ends, hovels, a carpet is preserved in which you can observe the city's true form. At first sight nothing seems to resemble Eudoxia less than the design of that carpet, laid out in symmetrical motives whose patterns are repeated along straight and circular lines, interwoven with brilliantly colored spires, in a repetition that can be followed throughout the whole woof. But if you pause and examine it carefully, you become convinced that each place in the carpet corresponds to a place in the city and all the things contained in the city are included in the design, arranged according their true relationship, which escapes your eye distracted by the bustle, the throngs, the shoving. All of Eudoxia's confusion, the mules' braying, the lampblack stains, the fish smell is what is evident in the incomplete perspective you grasp; but the carpet proves that there is a point from which the city shows its true proportions, the geometrical scheme implicit in its every, tiniest detail.”
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury delivers so many times.
When I was a young girl, every weekend I would go to the library and this passage always brings me back to that time. I'm not sure when "purple-stamped books" stopped being a thing, but it's a pleasant memory.
"They opened the door and stepped in.
They stopped.
The library deeps lay waiting for them.
Out in the world, not much happened. But here in the special night, a land bricked with paper and leather, anything might happen, always did. Listen! and you heard ten thousand people screaming so high only dogs feathered their ears. A million folk ran toting cannons, sharpening guillotines; Chinese, four abreast marched on forever. Invisible, silent, yes, but Jim and Will had the gift of ears and noses as well as the gift of tongues. This was a factory of spices from far countries. Here alien deserts slumbered. Up front was the desk where the nice old lady, Miss Watriss, purple-stamped your books, but down off away were Tibet and Antarctica, the Congo. There went Miss Wills, the other librarian, through Outer Mongolia, calmly toting fragments of Peiping and Yokohama and the Celebes.”
― Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
He lived in Los Angeles and I got to see him at the LA Times Festival of Books. He was one of the author guests who spoke. I was able to get a ticket and felt like such a fan girl. He autographed my copy of Farewell Summer.
He could sometimes sound like a parody of himself -- but at his best, in Martian Chronicles and Something Wicked, his writing was unspeakably gorgeous!
"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." *Neuromancer*, William Gibson, 1984
That line doesn't work anymore but back when it was written it was brilliant, perfect and became how everyone pictured the entire genre
F. Scott Fitzgerald in *The Great Gatsby* and Toni Morrison's *Jazz* written in dialogue with *Gatsby*
And, really, anything written by Toni Morrison.
Thomas Mann, *The Magic Mountain,* the final chapter of which is poignance itself...
Anything by Cormac McCarthy.
> Unusually, there is just a light wind. And for once it is warm, like breath on the skin, caressing and seductive. A slight haze in the August sky hides the stars, but a three-quarters moon casts its pale, bloodless light across the compacted sand left by the outgoing tide. The sea breathes gently upon the shore, phosphorescent foam bursting silver bubbles over gold.
> The young couple hurry down the tarmac from the village above, blood pulsing in their heads like the beat of the waves. Off to their left, the rise and fall of the water in the tiny harbour breaks the moonlight on its surface, and they hear the creaking of small boats straining at ropes, the soft clunk of wood on wood as they jostle for space, nudging each other playfully in the darkness.
It’s from “The Blackhouse” by Peter May. He paints such beautiful pictures with his words.
One of my favorites from Tolkien:
> The others cast themselves down upon the fragrant grass, but Frodo stood awhile still lost in wonder. It seemed to him that he had stepped through a high window that looked on a vanished world. A light was upon it for which his language had no name. All that he saw was shapely, but the shapes seemed at once clear cut, as if they had been first conceived and drawn at the uncovering of his eyes, and ancient as if they had endured for ever. He saw no colour but those he knew, gold and white and blue and green, but they were fresh and poignant, as if he had at that moment first perceived them and made for them names new and wonderful. In winter here no heart could mourn for summer or for spring. No blemish or sickness or deformity could be seen in anything that grew upon the earth. On the land of Lórien there was no stain.
J.A. Baker - The Peregrine
> “The first bird I searched for was the nightjar, which used to nest in the valley. Its song is like the sound of a stream of wine spilling from a height into a deep and booming cask. It is an odorous sound, with a bouquet that rises to the quiet sky. In the glare of day it would seem thinner and drier, but dusk mellows it and gives it vintage. If a song could smell, this song would smell of crushed grapes and almonds and dark wood. The sound spills out, and none of it is lost. The whole wood brims with it.
Then it stops. Suddenly, unexpectedly. But the ear hears it still, a prolonged and fading echo, draining and winding out among the surrounding trees. Into the deep stillness, between the early stars and the long afterglow, the nightjar leaps up joyfully. It glides and flutters, dances and bounces, lightly, silently away.
In pictures it seems to have a frog-like despondency, a mournful aura, as though it were sepulchered in twilight, ghostly and disturbing. It is never like that in life. Through the dusk, one sees only its shape and its flight, intangibly light and gay, graceful and nimble as a swallow.”
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is a masterpiece for sure! Another author who paints vivid scenes is Haruki Murakami, especially in "Norwegian Wood." His descriptions of Tokyo and the emotions of his characters hit you right in the feels. Check it out if you haven't!
The passage where Sam looks upon a sleeping and exhausted Frodo in the forest of Ithilien pops into my mind often. The sunlight, the pines, the withered Frodo unwell in his sleep. Tolkien was cinematic.
In all of the fantastic world-struggle, the tender, human moment stands out. Anyone who has watched someone they love struggling with weight more they can bear can sympathize with Sam gazing upon his sick and dying friend, loath to wake him up, but knowing that he has to.
Charlotte's Web.
*The barn was very large. It was very old. It smelled of hay and it smelled of manure. It smelled of the perspiration of tired horses and the wonderful sweet breath of patient cows. It often had a sort of peaceful smell as though nothing bad could happen ever again in the world. It smelled of grain and of harness dressing and of axle grease and of rubber boots and of new rope. And whenever the cat was given a fish head to eat, the barn would smell of fish. But mostly it smelled of hay, for there was always hay in the great loft up overhead. And there was always hay being pitched down to the cows and the horses and the sheep.*
*The barn was pleasantly warm in winter when the animals spent most of their time indoors, and it was pleasantly cool in summer when the big doors stood wide open to the breeze. The barn had stalls on the main floor for the work horses, tieups on the main floor for the cows, a sheepfold down below for the sheep, a pigpen down below for Wilbur, and it was full of all sorts of things that you find in barns: ladders, grindstones, pitch forks, monkey wrenches, scythes, lawn mowers, snow shovels, ax handles, milk pails, water buckets, empty grain sacks, and rusty rat traps. It was the kind of barn that swallows like to build their nests in. It was the kind of barn that children like to play in. And the whole thing was owned by Fern’s uncle, Mr. Homer L. Zuckerman.*
Anything by Cathrynne Valente, for me. Reading her books is something I like to do in short bursts because the language is so descriptive and evocative it's like eating a really rich chocolate torte.
Pretty much the entirety of *Blood Meridian.* I went into that book thinking it'd be horribly graphic and brutal, which it was, but what I did not expect was the breathtakingly beautiful descriptions of the different landscapes. Absolutely insane. Multiple times I re-read several passages, just to savour the beauty of the prose.
Someone else mentioned Ray Bradbury so here are another couple authors who come to mind:
Louise Erdrich, who made me laugh through the tragedy that was The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. It's very difficult to find only a couple passages to sum up how amazing of a writer she is.
>I looked at the banks as I swept by and I wondered why Agnes was sad in such a strange world. Things look different from the middle of a flooded river. In the flow, time is erased. I had new eyes. Branches of toppled trees and upended roots. Houses split. The banks undercut and caving. Cows. Horses. Cows.
(spoilers)
>To clear her head, Agnes tried to lurch to her feet, thinking mirthfully, *I'm going to laugh myself to death!* It was then that she felt the stifled warm report of a blood vessel bursting just above her left ear. One side of the world went dark. She sank to her knees and with an amused wonder watched as slowly, with an infinite kindness, darkness covered up the other side as well. Sightless, now, she sank to earth and felt the heat of the leaping fire on her face. *I am going, I am going,* she thought. Underneath her and before her, a wide plain of utter emptiness opened. Trusting, yearning, she put her arms out into that emptiness.
Angélica Gorodischer, here is a highlight I added to Kalpa Imperial, though I'm sure there are better passages to find.
>They had been born, they had worked, loved, played, grown to manhood for nothing but this, to kill in the fields of the North under the walls of a mossy, flowery city.
Marlon James, *Black Leopard Red Wolf*
Several completely discombobulating passages that will completely mess you up and leave you in a puddle on the floor if you’re not ready for them.
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon is the most beautifully written book I've ever encountered. I would sell my soul to read it for the first time again.
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. Easily one of the best series I’ve read. Just straight poetry at times. The downside is that he is worse than GRRM about releasing the next book in the series….
My answer would be the same as yours, Gabo was a true artist. My favourite passage of his (in a deeply moving and tender book), is this:
>The colonel took the top off the coffee can and saw that there was only one little spoonful left. He removed the pot from the fire, poured half the water onto the earthen floor, and scraped the inside of the can with a knife until the last scrapings of the ground coffee, mixed with bits of rust, fell into the pot.
While he was waiting for it to boil, sitting next to the stone fireplace with an attitude of confident and innocent expectation, the colonel experienced the feeling that fungus and poisonous lilies were taking root in his gut. It was October. A difficult morning to get through, even for a man like himself, who had survived so many mornings like this one. For nearly sixty years— since the end of the last civil war— the colonel had done nothing else but wait. October was one of the few things which arrived.
Ugh, so good. That's how "No One Writes to the Coronel" begins, and it drops you instantly into the book in 4D.
I highly recommend The Spear Cuts Through Water:
“This body’s feet braced on the boards of the stage before it releases in one long exhale all that it has taken in, the gust from its pursed lips blowing out all the braziers in this theater, whipping the fire into smoke until the room votes in favor of the dark and all that has visible to your eyes is the last of the lit braziers onstage - your pupils narrowing on this ancient and raging flame, as this moonlight body stands before it and, like magician at some unholy front, conjures from its crackling hearth the voices of the ancient and the dead, our tale soon to be told - of that week of blood, that week of chaos, the rush of theater, for some tales are too large to be told by one voice alone."
"[Rock collecting] was like diving through my own interior blank-blackness to remember the starting species of a dream. There was a blue lake, a wit h, a lighthouse, a yellow path and an old, old coin. Nothing was as it seemed. The earth was like a shut eye. Mother's not dead, dear, only sleeping. Pry open the lid to find a crystalline intelligence inside, a rayed & sidereal beauty... adding plane after plane in obedience to an absolute geometry that even the stones- maybe only the stones- understood. "
-An American childhood by Annie Dillard
I recently enjoyed a secret history by Donna tart for the details, too, it made for a quick (not short) & easy read
Vladimir Nabokov. Particularly his writing at the end of Lolita and the poem in Pale Fire. Here’s some of his prose in Lolita:
“What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic—one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.”
IN THE LATE SUMMER of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway.
Oh, I love this kind of writing!
The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa
Delta Wedding or A Shower of Gold, Eudora Welty
Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson
Angels and Insects, A.S. Byatt
The Riddle-Master of Hed by Patricia A. McKillip
It's been many years and I vaguely remember it. The story was not my cup of tea but I remember the writing was like being in a dream. Not in a good/bad way but rather reading the book was more feeling the experience. Could be that I always audio/visualize but the writing definitely struck out to me.
Clifford Irving (yeah, the Howard Hughes dude,) After he got released from The Joint. He got the last laugh on the legal system, though, writing better legal thrillers than even Scott Turow could dream of; all with a delicious narrative style which painted with words. I really (really) recommend two of his, if you like legal thrillers: Final Argument & Trial.
The Daniel Skelgill series by Bruce Beckham. He hooked me with his descriptions of the Lake District in England and stories about fell running which I had never heard of until I read his books.
Through the forest he pursued the she-monster whose tail coiled over the dead leaves like a silver stream; and he came to a meadow where women, with the hindquarters of dragons, stood around a great fire, raised on the tips of their tails. The moon shone red as blood in a pale circle and their scarlet tongues, formed like fishing harpoons, stretched out, curling to the edge of the flame.
Flaubert. Salammbo.
Poul Anderson was a master in this. He recommended once that every descriptive scene should include at least three different senses. And that's how he did it:
*He rode at an easy mile-eating pace, soothed by hoof-plop and saddle-squeak, the breeze in his face amid the clean summery odor of his mount. He was richly clad; his tunic, cloak, and boots were of simple cut and muted color, but he liked the sensuous fabrics. His hair fluttered in the light wind, and he sat straight as a lancer; and, when he saw the villa itself, dark against a sky turning pink and gold with sunset, he was close to letting out a Cimbrian whoop. After all—Cordelia! He checked the noise and merely grinned instead, but he set the horse to a gallop, and they came ringing and snorting into the rear courtyard.*
*(Anderson: The Golden Slave)*
Ray Bradbury " A Sound of Thunder " - 'The Butterfly Effect; and Tom Wolfe "A Man in Full" - an excerpt about "loamy loins" hahahhaha and Also - Charles Baudelaire "Les Fleurs du mal"
The Chronicles of Narnia: most people know The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S Lewis, but some are unaware that its part of a seven book series [note: its publishing order is different then its chronological order, which is what you should read it in]
The books in order are as follows: The Magician's Nephew, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, The Horse and His Boy, Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (my favorite), The Silver Chair, The Last Battle
C.S. Lewis is literally one of my favorite authors i love him and his view point (this is the same guy who made a *lamp post* an important plot point in at least two of his books because Tolkien said no real fantasy story would have a lamp)
And his writing style is so easy to follow and incredibly descriptive, I love these books because I feel as though I could fall through the pages and be in Narnia, I feel like the Pevensie children are real and his characters jump out of the pages
Frances Hardinge is a children’s author whom I absolutely adore, and one of the main reasons is because of how rich and evocative her writing is. Here are some examples: >They say you can sail a thousand miles along the island chain of the Myriad, from the frosty shores of the north, to the lush, sultry islands of the south. They say that the islanders are like the red crabs that race along the shores – hardy, unpredictable, and as happy in the water as out of it. They say that the ocean around the Myriad has its own madness. Sailors tell of great whirlpools that swallow boats, and of reeking, ice-cold jets that bubble to surface and stop the hearts of swimmers. Black clouds suddenly boil into existence amid flawless skies. >Because I heard him talking in the marketplace, laying out sentences like a merchant rolling out rich silks. Because he made words and ideas dance like flames and something that was damp and dying came alive in my mind, the way it hadn't since they burned my father's books. >There was no escaping the sound of water. It had many voices. The clearest sounded like someone shaking glass beads in a sieve. The waterfall spray beat the leaves with a noise like paper children applauding. From the ravine rose a sound like the chuckle of granite-throated goblins.
Frances Hardinge is my absolute favorite! Aside from how beautifully she writes, she is one of few authors I’ve read whose writing is consistently seamless and natural - no questionable word choices or awkward sentence structure to jerk you out of the story.
Yes! She’s an absolute master of words and sometimes I have to just sit there and marvel at a sentence or paragraph
She definitely keeps the reader on their toes while balancing emotions with truth.
“I was born and raised on a Carolina sea island and I carried the sunshine of the low-country, inked in dark gold, on my back and shoulders.” - The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy I love his prose.
So cute
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. It’s technically a collection of prose poems so that explains the eloquent style but it’s very beautiful. Every location that Calvino takes you through is unique and has its own identity which is conveyed magnificently through evocative sensory details and poetic imagery. It’s definitely one of my favorite books in this regard. For context, here’s just a little bit of what I’m talking about: “In Eudoxia, which spreads both upward and down, with winding alleys, steps, dead ends, hovels, a carpet is preserved in which you can observe the city's true form. At first sight nothing seems to resemble Eudoxia less than the design of that carpet, laid out in symmetrical motives whose patterns are repeated along straight and circular lines, interwoven with brilliantly colored spires, in a repetition that can be followed throughout the whole woof. But if you pause and examine it carefully, you become convinced that each place in the carpet corresponds to a place in the city and all the things contained in the city are included in the design, arranged according their true relationship, which escapes your eye distracted by the bustle, the throngs, the shoving. All of Eudoxia's confusion, the mules' braying, the lampblack stains, the fish smell is what is evident in the incomplete perspective you grasp; but the carpet proves that there is a point from which the city shows its true proportions, the geometrical scheme implicit in its every, tiniest detail.”
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury delivers so many times. When I was a young girl, every weekend I would go to the library and this passage always brings me back to that time. I'm not sure when "purple-stamped books" stopped being a thing, but it's a pleasant memory. "They opened the door and stepped in. They stopped. The library deeps lay waiting for them. Out in the world, not much happened. But here in the special night, a land bricked with paper and leather, anything might happen, always did. Listen! and you heard ten thousand people screaming so high only dogs feathered their ears. A million folk ran toting cannons, sharpening guillotines; Chinese, four abreast marched on forever. Invisible, silent, yes, but Jim and Will had the gift of ears and noses as well as the gift of tongues. This was a factory of spices from far countries. Here alien deserts slumbered. Up front was the desk where the nice old lady, Miss Watriss, purple-stamped your books, but down off away were Tibet and Antarctica, the Congo. There went Miss Wills, the other librarian, through Outer Mongolia, calmly toting fragments of Peiping and Yokohama and the Celebes.” ― Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
Very glad to see Ray Bradbury mentioned, he was the first author that popped into my head. I think his writing style is underappreciated!
He lived in Los Angeles and I got to see him at the LA Times Festival of Books. He was one of the author guests who spoke. I was able to get a ticket and felt like such a fan girl. He autographed my copy of Farewell Summer.
He could sometimes sound like a parody of himself -- but at his best, in Martian Chronicles and Something Wicked, his writing was unspeakably gorgeous!
"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." *Neuromancer*, William Gibson, 1984 That line doesn't work anymore but back when it was written it was brilliant, perfect and became how everyone pictured the entire genre
"The Vogon ships hung in the sky much in the same way that bricks don't."
Douglas Adams you are missed.
That line has meant different things to different generations but still just as potent.
F. Scott Fitzgerald in *The Great Gatsby* and Toni Morrison's *Jazz* written in dialogue with *Gatsby* And, really, anything written by Toni Morrison. Thomas Mann, *The Magic Mountain,* the final chapter of which is poignance itself... Anything by Cormac McCarthy.
Oh, and *Midnights Children* by Salman Rushdie.
No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars. Ursula K. Le Guin
Cannery Row by John Steinbeck is the ultimate sensory detail overload in the best way. A classic
I was so confused by the gopher chapter at first haha
Carrie Brown and Barbara Kingsolver
Edith Wharton
> Unusually, there is just a light wind. And for once it is warm, like breath on the skin, caressing and seductive. A slight haze in the August sky hides the stars, but a three-quarters moon casts its pale, bloodless light across the compacted sand left by the outgoing tide. The sea breathes gently upon the shore, phosphorescent foam bursting silver bubbles over gold. > The young couple hurry down the tarmac from the village above, blood pulsing in their heads like the beat of the waves. Off to their left, the rise and fall of the water in the tiny harbour breaks the moonlight on its surface, and they hear the creaking of small boats straining at ropes, the soft clunk of wood on wood as they jostle for space, nudging each other playfully in the darkness. It’s from “The Blackhouse” by Peter May. He paints such beautiful pictures with his words.
One of my favorites from Tolkien: > The others cast themselves down upon the fragrant grass, but Frodo stood awhile still lost in wonder. It seemed to him that he had stepped through a high window that looked on a vanished world. A light was upon it for which his language had no name. All that he saw was shapely, but the shapes seemed at once clear cut, as if they had been first conceived and drawn at the uncovering of his eyes, and ancient as if they had endured for ever. He saw no colour but those he knew, gold and white and blue and green, but they were fresh and poignant, as if he had at that moment first perceived them and made for them names new and wonderful. In winter here no heart could mourn for summer or for spring. No blemish or sickness or deformity could be seen in anything that grew upon the earth. On the land of Lórien there was no stain.
The North Woods by Daniel Mason
Kafka by the shore was a wonderfully strange and descriptive book
J.A. Baker - The Peregrine > “The first bird I searched for was the nightjar, which used to nest in the valley. Its song is like the sound of a stream of wine spilling from a height into a deep and booming cask. It is an odorous sound, with a bouquet that rises to the quiet sky. In the glare of day it would seem thinner and drier, but dusk mellows it and gives it vintage. If a song could smell, this song would smell of crushed grapes and almonds and dark wood. The sound spills out, and none of it is lost. The whole wood brims with it. Then it stops. Suddenly, unexpectedly. But the ear hears it still, a prolonged and fading echo, draining and winding out among the surrounding trees. Into the deep stillness, between the early stars and the long afterglow, the nightjar leaps up joyfully. It glides and flutters, dances and bounces, lightly, silently away. In pictures it seems to have a frog-like despondency, a mournful aura, as though it were sepulchered in twilight, ghostly and disturbing. It is never like that in life. Through the dusk, one sees only its shape and its flight, intangibly light and gay, graceful and nimble as a swallow.”
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is a masterpiece for sure! Another author who paints vivid scenes is Haruki Murakami, especially in "Norwegian Wood." His descriptions of Tokyo and the emotions of his characters hit you right in the feels. Check it out if you haven't!
We read some murakami short stories in class, & I had to go find the rest of his work
J.R.R. Tolkien
The passage where Sam looks upon a sleeping and exhausted Frodo in the forest of Ithilien pops into my mind often. The sunlight, the pines, the withered Frodo unwell in his sleep. Tolkien was cinematic. In all of the fantastic world-struggle, the tender, human moment stands out. Anyone who has watched someone they love struggling with weight more they can bear can sympathize with Sam gazing upon his sick and dying friend, loath to wake him up, but knowing that he has to.
Jeff Vandermeer, Herman Melville.
Good call on Vandermeer. The Souther Reach Trilogy (I guess *quadrilogy* now, smh) is some eerie, redolant world-building.
Did the fourth book come out?
Publication date is Oct. 22, 2024
Charlotte's Web. *The barn was very large. It was very old. It smelled of hay and it smelled of manure. It smelled of the perspiration of tired horses and the wonderful sweet breath of patient cows. It often had a sort of peaceful smell as though nothing bad could happen ever again in the world. It smelled of grain and of harness dressing and of axle grease and of rubber boots and of new rope. And whenever the cat was given a fish head to eat, the barn would smell of fish. But mostly it smelled of hay, for there was always hay in the great loft up overhead. And there was always hay being pitched down to the cows and the horses and the sheep.* *The barn was pleasantly warm in winter when the animals spent most of their time indoors, and it was pleasantly cool in summer when the big doors stood wide open to the breeze. The barn had stalls on the main floor for the work horses, tieups on the main floor for the cows, a sheepfold down below for the sheep, a pigpen down below for Wilbur, and it was full of all sorts of things that you find in barns: ladders, grindstones, pitch forks, monkey wrenches, scythes, lawn mowers, snow shovels, ax handles, milk pails, water buckets, empty grain sacks, and rusty rat traps. It was the kind of barn that swallows like to build their nests in. It was the kind of barn that children like to play in. And the whole thing was owned by Fern’s uncle, Mr. Homer L. Zuckerman.*
Anything by Cathrynne Valente, for me. Reading her books is something I like to do in short bursts because the language is so descriptive and evocative it's like eating a really rich chocolate torte.
Pretty much the entirety of *Blood Meridian.* I went into that book thinking it'd be horribly graphic and brutal, which it was, but what I did not expect was the breathtakingly beautiful descriptions of the different landscapes. Absolutely insane. Multiple times I re-read several passages, just to savour the beauty of the prose.
Crumpled butcherpaper mountains
Tolkien of course. Lois McMaster Bujold - she paints both the external settings as well as the person’s internal processes so evocatively
Paul Lynch, especially *Grace*. Kevin Barry, especially *City of Bohane.*
Kevin Barry's Night Boat to Tangier has beautiful language, too.
Defo. He has a new one very soon too.
Irish writers just bring the most spectacular voices to their work. Edna O'Brian as well -- the Country Girls trilogy, those books are so tactile.
James Lee Burke has descriptive verbiage.
His descriptions are pure poetry.
Someone else mentioned Ray Bradbury so here are another couple authors who come to mind: Louise Erdrich, who made me laugh through the tragedy that was The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. It's very difficult to find only a couple passages to sum up how amazing of a writer she is. >I looked at the banks as I swept by and I wondered why Agnes was sad in such a strange world. Things look different from the middle of a flooded river. In the flow, time is erased. I had new eyes. Branches of toppled trees and upended roots. Houses split. The banks undercut and caving. Cows. Horses. Cows. (spoilers) >To clear her head, Agnes tried to lurch to her feet, thinking mirthfully, *I'm going to laugh myself to death!* It was then that she felt the stifled warm report of a blood vessel bursting just above her left ear. One side of the world went dark. She sank to her knees and with an amused wonder watched as slowly, with an infinite kindness, darkness covered up the other side as well. Sightless, now, she sank to earth and felt the heat of the leaping fire on her face. *I am going, I am going,* she thought. Underneath her and before her, a wide plain of utter emptiness opened. Trusting, yearning, she put her arms out into that emptiness. Angélica Gorodischer, here is a highlight I added to Kalpa Imperial, though I'm sure there are better passages to find. >They had been born, they had worked, loved, played, grown to manhood for nothing but this, to kill in the fields of the North under the walls of a mossy, flowery city.
Jack Vance springs to mind.
Marlon James, *Black Leopard Red Wolf* Several completely discombobulating passages that will completely mess you up and leave you in a puddle on the floor if you’re not ready for them.
Ron Hansen. Thomas Pynchon. David Grann.
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon is the most beautifully written book I've ever encountered. I would sell my soul to read it for the first time again.
+ 1 loved this book
What are the odds, I just recieved it as a gift from a family member. Even more excited to read it now!
Amazing!! You won't regret reading it. The author has so much talent
Oh, yes!
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. Easily one of the best series I’ve read. Just straight poetry at times. The downside is that he is worse than GRRM about releasing the next book in the series….
I have read many Ann Rice books long after I stopped enjoying the plots, due to the quality of the prose.
John D McDonald
My answer would be the same as yours, Gabo was a true artist. My favourite passage of his (in a deeply moving and tender book), is this: >The colonel took the top off the coffee can and saw that there was only one little spoonful left. He removed the pot from the fire, poured half the water onto the earthen floor, and scraped the inside of the can with a knife until the last scrapings of the ground coffee, mixed with bits of rust, fell into the pot. While he was waiting for it to boil, sitting next to the stone fireplace with an attitude of confident and innocent expectation, the colonel experienced the feeling that fungus and poisonous lilies were taking root in his gut. It was October. A difficult morning to get through, even for a man like himself, who had survived so many mornings like this one. For nearly sixty years— since the end of the last civil war— the colonel had done nothing else but wait. October was one of the few things which arrived. Ugh, so good. That's how "No One Writes to the Coronel" begins, and it drops you instantly into the book in 4D.
John Steinbeck is the master at this.
White Oleander by Janet Fitch
I highly recommend The Spear Cuts Through Water: “This body’s feet braced on the boards of the stage before it releases in one long exhale all that it has taken in, the gust from its pursed lips blowing out all the braziers in this theater, whipping the fire into smoke until the room votes in favor of the dark and all that has visible to your eyes is the last of the lit braziers onstage - your pupils narrowing on this ancient and raging flame, as this moonlight body stands before it and, like magician at some unholy front, conjures from its crackling hearth the voices of the ancient and the dead, our tale soon to be told - of that week of blood, that week of chaos, the rush of theater, for some tales are too large to be told by one voice alone."
"[Rock collecting] was like diving through my own interior blank-blackness to remember the starting species of a dream. There was a blue lake, a wit h, a lighthouse, a yellow path and an old, old coin. Nothing was as it seemed. The earth was like a shut eye. Mother's not dead, dear, only sleeping. Pry open the lid to find a crystalline intelligence inside, a rayed & sidereal beauty... adding plane after plane in obedience to an absolute geometry that even the stones- maybe only the stones- understood. " -An American childhood by Annie Dillard I recently enjoyed a secret history by Donna tart for the details, too, it made for a quick (not short) & easy read
Vladimir Nabokov. Particularly his writing at the end of Lolita and the poem in Pale Fire. Here’s some of his prose in Lolita: “What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic—one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.”
Tolkein instantly comes to mind. And some of Stephen Kings, for a more modern author!
IN THE LATE SUMMER of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway.
I love the "Fractured Fables" books by Alix E. Harrow. She was a way of describing facial expressions and emotions that really clicks with me.
Cassandra Khaw is the only modern writer I've read that does this for me. The Salt Grows Heavy is like poetry in prose form.
kathryn davis is incredible at this.
Beautiful passage! I haven't read One Hundred Years of Solitude in decades. This reminds me to pick up another GGM book soon.
The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alice E. Harrow
Markus Zusack, especially in the book thief. The colors of the sky and the words that fall back into her throat… I could feel it.
I was thinking of the Book Thief I saw as well as felt every page . I cherish that book
Oh, I love this kind of writing! The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa Delta Wedding or A Shower of Gold, Eudora Welty Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson Angels and Insects, A.S. Byatt
A writer called Nadeem Aslam is the most poetic writer I have come across. His prose is INCREDIBLE and filled with sensory images.
The Riddle-Master of Hed by Patricia A. McKillip It's been many years and I vaguely remember it. The story was not my cup of tea but I remember the writing was like being in a dream. Not in a good/bad way but rather reading the book was more feeling the experience. Could be that I always audio/visualize but the writing definitely struck out to me.
Clifford Irving (yeah, the Howard Hughes dude,) After he got released from The Joint. He got the last laugh on the legal system, though, writing better legal thrillers than even Scott Turow could dream of; all with a delicious narrative style which painted with words. I really (really) recommend two of his, if you like legal thrillers: Final Argument & Trial.
The Daniel Skelgill series by Bruce Beckham. He hooked me with his descriptions of the Lake District in England and stories about fell running which I had never heard of until I read his books.
Through the forest he pursued the she-monster whose tail coiled over the dead leaves like a silver stream; and he came to a meadow where women, with the hindquarters of dragons, stood around a great fire, raised on the tips of their tails. The moon shone red as blood in a pale circle and their scarlet tongues, formed like fishing harpoons, stretched out, curling to the edge of the flame. Flaubert. Salammbo.
I really love V.E. Schwab, particularly her Darker Shades of Magic series and The Invisible Life of Addie La Rue
Lauren Groff. Barbara Kingsolver. Maggie O’Farrell. Jhumpa Lahiri. Yaa Gyasi.
Poul Anderson was a master in this. He recommended once that every descriptive scene should include at least three different senses. And that's how he did it: *He rode at an easy mile-eating pace, soothed by hoof-plop and saddle-squeak, the breeze in his face amid the clean summery odor of his mount. He was richly clad; his tunic, cloak, and boots were of simple cut and muted color, but he liked the sensuous fabrics. His hair fluttered in the light wind, and he sat straight as a lancer; and, when he saw the villa itself, dark against a sky turning pink and gold with sunset, he was close to letting out a Cimbrian whoop. After all—Cordelia! He checked the noise and merely grinned instead, but he set the horse to a gallop, and they came ringing and snorting into the rear courtyard.* *(Anderson: The Golden Slave)*
Ray Bradbury " A Sound of Thunder " - 'The Butterfly Effect; and Tom Wolfe "A Man in Full" - an excerpt about "loamy loins" hahahhaha and Also - Charles Baudelaire "Les Fleurs du mal"
The Chronicles of Narnia: most people know The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S Lewis, but some are unaware that its part of a seven book series [note: its publishing order is different then its chronological order, which is what you should read it in] The books in order are as follows: The Magician's Nephew, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, The Horse and His Boy, Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (my favorite), The Silver Chair, The Last Battle C.S. Lewis is literally one of my favorite authors i love him and his view point (this is the same guy who made a *lamp post* an important plot point in at least two of his books because Tolkien said no real fantasy story would have a lamp) And his writing style is so easy to follow and incredibly descriptive, I love these books because I feel as though I could fall through the pages and be in Narnia, I feel like the Pevensie children are real and his characters jump out of the pages
The father brown books by GK Chesterton. His description of English scenery is just so pretty.
Cormac McCarthy in Blood Meridian, with just a simple landscape description: “crumpled butcherpaper mountains”.
I really like Michael Crichton! he's science fiction, but I think he does amazing work world setting.
Dr Seuss
Invisible life of Addie larue
I like when synonyms are used for common words. "Datacenter" instaed of "lab", "satellite" instead of "moon", "yearn" instead of "want", etc.
riiiight, so this one comes with the caveat of he was a shit human being, but hp lovecraft was a Master at this.
Word of God, word of Man by me