Favourite Writers

Do you ever get asked who your favourite author is? I do, and quite often. What is my favourite book usually follows in quick succession. When I was first asked those questions many moons ago, I didn’t really have a satisfactory answer because I was a lot younger then and had plenty more books to read. Back in the day I was a great Alister McLean fan, but then I also liked Nevil Shute. Nevil Shute was actually a pen name to separate him from Nevil Shute Norway, the engineer. Yes that’s how it was back then. He thought that he would not be taken seriously as an engineer when people realised that he was also a novelist. And then came along Wilbur Smith with his adventure novels set in South Africa, and the list goes on and on.

When I’m asked the same questions to today I look to my bookshelves at home for the answer. Authors that take up the most shelving space are the books I enjoy reading the most. The answer to the second question is based on which book I have read the most times. The logic makes sense to me, but it is still a bit sketchy because if I have every book an author writes, then the author who writes the most books takes up more shelf space. The glaring hole in that approach is the quality and quantity issue which I solved with the consistency of quality test. Are you still with me, or have you bailed out to give your head a rest. Here’s a quick example. John Le Carre (excuse the omission of the accent mark) is one of my favourite writers of all time, but I didn’t enjoy his later work as much as his earlier stuff, so he languishes in third place behind two American writers.

I will answer the second question first in keeping with my lopsided logic. The book that I have read the most is To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. It won the Pulitzer Prize a year after its release, and it became a classic of modern American literature. If you haven’t already read the book, then I would encourage you to read it. Harper Lee only wrote two books and the second book, Go Set a Watchman, was released in 2015 as a sequel to her first novel. Interestingly, Go Set a Watchman predates To Kill a Mockingbird and was the first book she wrote and put forward for publication. The publishers at the time didn’t publish the book and told her to rewrite the story when the adults in the book were kids. She did, and the rest is history, as the saying goes.

So, who are my favourite authors. Based on what I said before about shelf space and continuous high quality are Dean Koontz and Stephen King. I have read all of their books and enjoyed them all. Stephen King tops my chart because he has a knack of chilling me to the bone in a way no other writer has. A good example is Pet Sematary. I won’t talk too much about the story just in case you haven’t read it or seen the film/s. He wrote the book over forty years ago, and it is still scaring people half to death as they turn the pages. When he finished writing the story he thought that the book was too frightening to publish and didn’t want to share it with his readers for that reason. But he was persuaded to publish the story, and the manuscript emerged from its dark resting place in a draw and drew its readers into an even darker place. Certain scenes in the book are so emotionally disturbing that your whole being is drained of all goodness and sanity. On a lighter note, he actually got the ideas for the story from events in his own life, and I would thoroughly recommend that you do a bit of research because the story behind the story is fascinating. SD