What’s your non-exhaustive list? Here’s mine.  Permit me to add to it later:

G.K. Chesterton |Inspired by his unapologetic apologetics; touched by his romantic and sweeping faith, thrilled by his unadulterated humor and the skill with which he turns an argument on a dime.

Marilynne Robinson | If I could reach into someone’s guts with a story like she did me through Gilead, to churn and hurtle the inner man with such emotional resonance, I could die a happy writer.

William Gibson (the playwright, although what I’ve read of the cyberpunk novelist of the same name I admire) | The moments of revelation he earns, through surprise, in a single line in those plays of his I’ve seen or read depress and school me as a writer.

Annie Dillard | I wish she wrote more, which is both a stupid thing to say and a compliment.  Perhaps she takes to heart the advice of another writer I admire and wish wrote more,

Harper Lee | who said, “I’d rather be silent than be a fool.”  Perhaps the literary world is just better for what they have and have not written.

Anne Carson | Have you read what she does with words?  Over my head with delight.

Charles Dickens | Have you noticed that thus far all the writing men I’ve mentioned are no longer living?  Foreboding.  I’m amazed that he wrote such staggering plots, masterpieces like A Tale of Two Cities, episodically.  That means he wrote the story as it was being serialized!  Don’t act like you’re not impressed.

G. Campbell Morgan | If you read one of his sermons, especially during his time at the Westminster Pulpit, you will know why.  He knew how to till the earth and plant a pregnant seed.

Hey.  Here are two writing men that are alive:

Bill Watterson | Yes. The man of Calvin and Hobbes fame.  Because he is intelligent and hilarious and because he said this: “It’s always better to leave the party early.”

Paul Haggis | Bringing story, actual story, to cinematic audiences.

Oh, here’s a third:

Michael Ondaatje | Gee, Andrew, who doesn’t want to write like a Booker Prize-winning author’s whose work is translated into Academy Award winning films?  Look past the accolades, and read his poetic, visceral work so grounded in the senses.

Okay, I actually have to curb this list and go and write for awhile myself.  But a quick more few:

Paul L. Maier | What I’ve read of his historical fiction captivated and intrigued.

John Donne | (I told you this was in no particular order). Oh to write such surprising and perplexing metaphysical conceits!

Peggy Noonan and Ann Coulter | Because paradox means, certainly, that things –lists included– don’t go feeble at the end.  I admire the thoughtfulness and brazen conviction; the awe and the shock; the tenderness and the sharp edge. Punches that aren’t pulled though they both do not pull punches differently.  Herbal tea and the gin.

There are more, and there are lesser writers too.  But away I go to write, inspired.

Don’t worry.  It’s not an exhaustive list.  We do not have space enough or time.

You ever read something and feel like everything you know or knew just doesn’t cut it?

I’m motivated by a line from one of the best book’s I’ve read, during an arc in the narrative that cut through my flesh like a knife cuts through heated butter: “I  do not understand one thing in this world.  Not one.”

It’s a liberating and emphatic admission.  Here are a few lines from books that made me announce the sentiment this week:

“For Who among men knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of the man, which is in him?”  In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence.  Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable — which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live.  We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity.  But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.

- John Ames, in Gilead

“Our motive for surrender should not be for any personal gain at all.  We have become so self-centered that we go to God only for something from Him, and not for God Himself.”

- Read the whole devotion on Surrender from Mr. O.

True abiding consists of two parts: occupying a position into which Christ can come and abide, and abiding in Him so that the soul lets Him take the place of the self to become our life.

- Andrew Murray in With Christ in the School of Prayer

Love is like grace — the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.

- John Ames in Gilead

]]> http://andrewkooman.com/archives/3398/feed 3 http://andrewkooman.com/archives/3178 http://andrewkooman.com/archives/3178#comments Wed, 24 Feb 2010 13:46:19 +0000 andrewkooman http://andrewkooman.com/?p=3178

Art & Soul: Signposts for Christians in the Arts, gifted to me from my friend, fellow writer, and poet Linda Siebenga.

Gilead, a re-read, because I must!  For me the best American novel I’ve ever read.  LIFE.CHANGING

What greater gift can a writer give a reader than another book?  I don’t know that I’ve ever been so affected by a work of fiction.  You know that feeling when you don’t want to turn the last page of a book you love.   You can imagine my happiness, then, when I turned the last page of Gilead, Robinson’s exquisite book to discover her latest work involves the same characters in the same town, told from a different perspective.

A. O. Scott wrote a fantastic article about Marilynbe Robinson’s latest novel Home for the New York Times which was included on the publication’s list of the top 100 books of the year.  The article discusses both novels’ themes and increases my appetite to read her work.

I always imagine divine mercy giving us back to ourselves and letting us laugh at what we became, laugh at the preposterous disguises of crouch and squint and limp and lour we all do put on.  I enjoy the hope that when we meet I will not be estranged from you by all the oddnesses life has carved into me.

- John Boughton in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead