Not necessarily the fanciest/purplest prose or poetry, but the easiest to read and enjoy. What books/series make you forget you are reading simply due to the quality of the prose?
I enjoy literary, lyrical, and elegant prose, but I also like a good story with complex characters.
*“Speech to him was a task, a battle, words mustered behind his beard and issued one at a time, heavy and square like tanks.”*
― **Margaret Atwood**, [Surfacing](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/924766)
*“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.”*― **Cormac McCarthy,** [Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1065465)
*“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.”*
― **Vladimir Nabokov,** [Lolita](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1268631)
*“Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. I have known so many sick women all my life. Women with chronic pain, with ever-gestating diseases. Women with conditions. Men, sure, they have bone snaps, they have backaches, they have a surgery or two, yank out a tonsil, insert a shiny plastic hip. Women get consumed.”*
― **Gillian Flynn,** [Sharp Objects](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/3801)
*“He wanted to go on for hours. He wanted someone to listen to him and to understand that speech wasn’t just about communicating ideas or opinions. Sometimes, it was about trying to convey whole human lives. And while you knew even before you opened your mouth that you’d fail, somehow the trying was what mattered. The trying was all you had.”*
― **Dennis Lehane,** [Mystic River](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1234249)
“*The sunrise was the colour of bad blood. It leaked out of the east and stained the dark sky red, marked the scraps of the cloud with stolen gold. Underneath it the road twisted up the mountainside towards the fortress of Fontezarmo – a cluster of sharp towers, ash-black again the wounded heavens. The sunrise was red, black and gold.*
The colours of their profession.”
― **Joe Abercrombie**, [Best Served Cold](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2322406)
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Pretty much anything written by Jeffrey Archer.
I enjoy literary, lyrical, and elegant prose, but I also like a good story with complex characters.
*“Speech to him was a task, a battle, words mustered behind his beard and issued one at a time, heavy and square like tanks.”*
― **Margaret Atwood**, [Surfacing](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/924766)
*“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.”*― **Cormac McCarthy,** [Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1065465)
*“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.”*
― **Vladimir Nabokov,** [Lolita](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1268631)
*“Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. I have known so many sick women all my life. Women with chronic pain, with ever-gestating diseases. Women with conditions. Men, sure, they have bone snaps, they have backaches, they have a surgery or two, yank out a tonsil, insert a shiny plastic hip. Women get consumed.”*
― **Gillian Flynn,** [Sharp Objects](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/3801)
*“He wanted to go on for hours. He wanted someone to listen to him and to understand that speech wasn’t just about communicating ideas or opinions. Sometimes, it was about trying to convey whole human lives. And while you knew even before you opened your mouth that you’d fail, somehow the trying was what mattered. The trying was all you had.”*
― **Dennis Lehane,** [Mystic River](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1234249)
“*The sunrise was the colour of bad blood. It leaked out of the east and stained the dark sky red, marked the scraps of the cloud with stolen gold. Underneath it the road twisted up the mountainside towards the fortress of Fontezarmo – a cluster of sharp towers, ash-black again the wounded heavens. The sunrise was red, black and gold.*
The colours of their profession.”
― **Joe Abercrombie**, [Best Served Cold](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2322406)
Braiding Sweetgrass
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa
The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
The Red Tent by Anita Diamant