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Dear Reader,
I'm on vacation this week and some of my friends have graciously offered to fill in for me while I'm gone. Today's column is written by author Douglas Clegg. Doug reads at the book clubs every day. He's a huge fan and one heck of a nice guy.
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@DearReader.com
http://www.DearReader.com
Today's guest columnist, author Douglas Clegg...
I am a wanderer among the dead.
It's true.
It's not just because I write fantasy, horror, and suspense that I like dead writers. But I do like them. I don't mean I like their corpses -- honest! I prefer the company of living writers, and I read a lot of books from both the quick and the dead.
I like writers who still make me feel the way I felt when I first read their fiction. And many of them are long-gone.
Charles Dickens is tops on my list. He wrote novels to change the way we think about the world, to express a reality of life that fiction needed to reveal, and created unforgettable characters (Miss Haversham, Pip, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Ebenezeer Scrooge, to name just a handful.)
Then there's Shirley Jackson, whose short story The Lottery was practically required reading when I was young, and whose novel The Haunting of Hill House has influenced me greatly as a novelist. Others include Anya Seton (if you've never read Green Darkness or Katherine, please read them), Daphne DuMaurier (her horror stories alone would put her up with my favorites, but the gothic, Rebecca, and then My Cousin Rachel and Jamaica Inn are just must-reads, in my opinion, as well.) In short stories, my favorite writer has been dead for a long time: Guy De Maupassant. Never read him? Read him. You will not regret it.
Actually, the list of dead writers I love is so long that I can't list them all -- but I re-read their work all the time for pure pleasure. And to me, none of these writers is dead; their prose resurrects them so I can hear their voices as I read their tales. It's as if they're standing near me, telling their stories.
The most exciting thing is when I find a living writer whose work has that quality where I, again, awaken to the pure enjoyment of reading. One of these is Bryce Courtney, whose novel The Power of One, blew me away. It's one of the most wonderful novels I have read in the past decade.
What are some of your favorites who seem to have written classic tales that are unforgettable? Are there hidden gems among the novels and stories you love that few other people know about? Drop me a line and let me know and please come by my website at http://www.douglasclegg.com/ to say hello.
Thank you,
Douglas Clegg
DClegg@DouglasClegg.com
READ THE CLASSICS: The Recognitions, by William Gaddis, and enter the free Penguin Classic's Drawing. Go to: http://www.supportlibrary.com/nl/path_go.cfm?x=815&site=20
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