Top Ten Tuesday - Famous Authors I Have Not Read (but wish to)

 

This weeks topic, proposed by The Broke and The Bookish,  is actually one I've been working on over the last 2-3 years. A few years ago I made a list of authors that I should enjoy, but which I had not yet read. Some authors on that list that I have since caught up with: Stephen King (ish), China Mieville, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Eliot, Barbara Pym and Ian McEwen. It's been a fruitful exercise as I've really enjoyed everything I've read by these author with one exception (King). Thankfully, I still have quite a few authors left on the list to discover!  I've listed them here with the novel for each that I thought I'd start with.  I'd appreciate advice or other recommendations if people have a favorite book by any of these authors! 

1) Cormac McCarthy

I thought I'd try Blood Meridian. "An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion..."

 2) Iris Murdoch

The Sea, The Sea 
"Charles Arrowby, leading light of England's theatrical set, retires from glittering London to an isolated home by the sea. He plans to write a memoir about his great love affair with Clement Makin, his mentor both professionally and personally, and to amuse himself with Lizzie, an actress he has strung along for many years. None of his plans work out ..." (Goodreads Description)

 3) Terry Tempest Williams

Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place  "In the spring of 1983 Terry Tempest Williams learned that her mother was dying of cancer. That same season, The Great Salt Lake began to rise to record heights, threatening the herons, owls, and snowy egrets that Williams, a poet and naturalist, had come to gauge her life by...."(Goodreads Description)

 

4)Margaret Atwood

Oryx and Crake "Oryx and Crake is at once an unforgettable love story and a compelling vision of the future...." (Goodreads Description)

5) Octavia Butler

Wild Seed  "Doro is an entity who changes bodies like clothes, killing his hosts by reflex or design. He fears no one until he meets Anyanwu. Anyanwu is a shapeshifter who can absorb bullets and heal with a kiss and savage anyone who threatens her. She fears no one until she meets Doro...." (Goodreads Description)
 

6) Wilkie Collins

Woman in White  'In one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop... There, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth, stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white'

 7) E.M. Forster

Howard's End  "Howard's End is a novel by E. M. Forster, first published in 1910, about social conventions, codes of conduct, and personal relationships in turn-of-the-century England." (Goodreads Description)

 8) Larry McMurtry

 Lonesome Dove "A love story, an adventure, an American epic, LONESOME DOVE embraces all the West -- legend and fact, heroes and outlaws, whores and ladies, Indians and settlers -- in a novel that recreates the central American experience, the most enduring of our national myths." (Goodreads Description)

 9) Joyce Carol Oates

Bellefleur "A wealthy and notorious clan, the Bellefleurs live in a region not unlike the Adirondacks, in an enormous mansion on the shores of mythical Lake Noir." (Goodreads Description)

10) Virginia Woolf

To the Lighhouse "The novel that established Virginia Woolf as a leading writer of the twentieth century, To the Lighthouse is made up of three powerfully charged visions into the life of one family living in a summer house off the rocky coast of Scotland." (Goodreads Description)




So what well known authors would you like to catch up with?  If you are a particular fan of any of the authors on my list, do you have any advice on which of there books to start with?