My Favorite Authors Didn't Write My Favorite Books

A few years ago I read a book so good that upon finishing it I knew immediately it would stand out as one of my top favorites for many years to come. It’s a book that bleeds with passion, and it sunk in deep for me.

The following year I picked up another book by the same author, and although it was of the utmost quality, for whatever reason it didn’t fascinate me like the other one did.

I’m talking about Love In The Time Of Cholera, an excellent novel that I failed to really lose myself in, and One Hundred Years Of Solitude, perhaps the greatest work of fiction ever concocted by man.

What I find interesting—and the reason for this post—is that despite writing one of my all time favorite novels, I don’t consider Gabriel Garcia Marquez as one of my top favorite authors. I could say he’s a favorite in the sense that without him, we wouldn’t have 100 Years, but if I consider the authors who influenced, changed, and inspired me the most, over the longest amount of time or the most novels or the most amount of writing, I’m afraid Marquez gets pushed pretty far down the list.

Now that I set myself to the task of naming my top three favorite authors, I find it messier than I’d expected. It’s been a long time since I’ve read some of those I consider most important to me, and perhaps I’ll need to revise my list someday soon. But in the interest of science, I’ll choose the ones that seem most obvious to me:

Jack Kerouac — Hunter S. Thompson — Ken Kesey

Looking at the list I notice that (aside from the fact that I’m obsessed with the ‘60s)  my favorite authors are the ones who did more than just write. They lived lives worth writing about, and then followed through in experimental, transgressive, and poetic ways. Their genius comes through in the full span of their work, and may not be visible from a single book.

And in fact some of what I love about each of them comes not from their own writing but from what others wrote about them. They were fascinating people whose art transcended their lives, so they are my favorites even if no single piece they made is the best I’ve ever seen.

My favorite novels, on the other hand, stand on their own as works of art complete in themselves. The author’s life and lifestyle, their personality and their real-life exploits are all irrelevant. If the novel is good enough, it needs no context.

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami are the other two that stand alongside 100 Years in my top three favorites. (A few others come very close, but if I limit myself to three, it has to be these.)

And it’s true that I know very little about the authors of my favorite novels, nor do I care so much to look into them. Their works speak for themselves so well that I actually worry it might diminish them to know too much about their creators.

...As an aside, I have read quite a bit of Murakami, and while I greatly enjoyed his other books, none of them spoke to me on such a deep level as Wind-Up, not enough for him to crack the ranks of my top favorite authors in any case...

Well, this is all pretty frivolous, but I think it’s fun to ponder. And I want to know, is it true for you too? Were your favorite novels written by your favorite authors? Which of your favorite authors would win in a fight? Let me know in the comments!

Peace,

Gilbo