I’ve read the Wolf Hall trilogy and A Place of Greater Safety several times apiece. This has created a fairly serious problem in my reading life: Hilary Mantel’s prose is so inexhaustibly, infuriatingly, transcendently beautiful that now other writers continually fail to satisfy my craving. All I want to do is keep coming back to bask in her linguistic world.
(I know one obvious answer is “read the rest of Hilary Mantel’s books,” which I will most certainly be doing. Unfortunately, that’s not a sustainable lifelong strategy, especially now that she has been stolen from us.)
Who or what are you reading that scratches that itch for musicality and color? What are the books that you can jump in on any random page because the words are just that delicious to your brain, no matter what the subject is? What’s the last book you cracked open and made you say “oh my god, _finally?_”
Genre isn’t as important to me as it used to be. All things being equal, I’m drawn to fiction, especially historical fiction (no surprise). Science fiction and fantasy are also close to my nerdy heart, but it feels especially hard to find stuff in those genres that stands out in terms of poetic language and voice, even if the ideas, ambition and storytelling craft are otherwise great. So, quite honestly, I’ll try anything.
by Kaelri