I don’t care if it is fiction or nonfiction, fantasy, sci-fi, thriller, historical, biography, psychological, philosophical, etc..
The only requirement is that when you read the book you felt that it was beautifully worded. That you couldn’t imagine how someone could articulate something on paper like that.
What’s the best you got?
by TheRunningMD
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
Kingkiller Chronicles.
Douglas Adams’ prose is unrivaled in a strange and amazing way
Cormac McCarthy books are bleak and grim but beautifully written.
Dubliners
Kafka on the Shore is beautifully written. Same with Stoner. Also Immortality by Kundera
Franz Kafka – The Trial
Currently reading The Book Thief – Markus Zusak which is really well written too!
*East of Eden* , a story that gently strips away illusions of good, evil, choice and fate. The way it shows people’s struggles felt real, messy and somehow beautiful. A long read, but worth every page:)
West with the night. The autbiography of Beryl Markham, a female bush pilot at a time when such a thing ws unheard of, had an affair with royalty, way ahead of her time. Her story is amazing – she was inspiraration for one of the characters in ‘Out of africa’. It’s the writing that knocks you out. National Geographic rated it as one of the ten best adventure books of all time. Earnest Hemingway said it was the only book he wished he had written, and of course the critics thought she couldn’t have written it because it was too good for a first book. It was her only book and it will leave you wishing she had written more.
For fiction: I’ve been worshipping *WATERSHIP DOWN* by Richard Adams for fifty years. I honestly feel that it’s unique in world literature, a subgenre of one.
There’s literally and figuratively never been anything that comes close to its astonishing beauty of writing, characterization, mood, theme, and plot and what it pulled off as an adventure story and fleshed out world about “rabbits.” Just something magical about it along with great intelligence, empathy, and insight.
I know there are hundreds of thousands of people who feel the same way!
For nonfiction: Barbara Tuchman: *The Guns of August*. New York: Macmillan, 1962.
Obviously, it’s a 60-year-old book so a lot of the scholarship has been filled out or even disputed by new sources and new interpretations. But there’s no question that she was a magnificent writer. I don’t think anybody wrote history with her verve and literary genius.
For my money, Tuchman has the most magisterial opening of any non-fiction book ever:
“So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun. After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens–four dowager and three regnant–and a scattering of special ambassadors from uncrowned countries. Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last. The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.”