I want to read something that's a novel but written like poetry, or has sentences that make you think, how the hell can someone ever come up with such a sentence.
Something like
"Indelible scars, pivotal marks
Blue as the life she fled
Carolina pines, won't you cover me?
Hide me like robes, down the back road
Muddy these webs we weave" -Carolina by Taylor Swift
Ik that's a song but if there's a novel or even poetry with a story written like this, it'll be awesome.
Thanks
by martian_doggo
10 Comments
A backpack filled with sunsets by Ifeanyi Ogbo
The old capital by Yasunari Kawabata. Pretty much all of his works have a poetic feel to it
Pale Fire by Nabokov
It’s written from the pov of a fictional poet and it’s both a novel and a poem.
Opening lines:
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff – and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.
And from the inside, too, I’d duplicate
Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:
Uncurtaining the night, I’d let dark glass
Hang all the furniture above the grass,
And how delightful when a fall of snow
Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land
Why am I downvoted into oblivion 😭
Use the search strategy, “novels in verse.” This is a lovely format. It is very popular with young adult readers.
Try anything by Virginia Woolf! I recommend starting with Mrs. Dalloway. It’s such a beautiful novel
I felt like this reading “This is How You Lose The Time War”. It’s a beautiful epistolary if nothing else
Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson
Maybe you would like something like the Odyssey or the Iliad by Homer. It was written in dactylic hexameter, which gives it a poetic rhythm in its native Greek. I like the Emily Wilson translations, where she writes in Iambic pentameter. It preserves the story while also putting it in a rhythm suited to english. There are many translations though, all with subtle (and sometimes not subtle) changes to the story.
Seeker of the Gentle Heart, Wind Walker, Ride the Laughing Wind and Shadowtaker by Blaine Yorgason.