M is for Murakami, Haruki

Haruki Murakami has been criticized for his "surrealistic and nihilistic" fantasy by some Japanese critics, but for me, that's what makes his work so wonderfully original and engaging. Also, my first encounter with the novelist was through Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which was a lovely story filled with hope and beauty. It's a book I recommend to friends who don't really read "lit fic" and they've enjoyed it. I know a producer who's trying to bring this novel to the screen and I hope he succeeds because it would make a really beautiful movie. (I was not a huge fan of Ang Lee's Life of Pi, but wasn't it gorgeous? The right director could turn Murakami's work into something visually stunning to compete with the superhero movies and the giant robots.)

L is for Lee, Tanith

I like my name. "Katherine" is a great name. It pairs well with almost any last name and it's been pretty popular throughout history. But the first thing I thought when I encountered Tanith Lee's writing was that she had one one of the great writer names. How cool is the name "Tanith?" Who wouldn't want to be named after a sky goddess? According to Wikipedia, Tanith has written 90 novels and more than 300 short stories. I found her about midway in her career, and was just stunned by the many different kinds of fantasy she wrote. The first book I read was her novella, To Kill the Dead, which came in a double-book from the Science Fiction and Fantasy book club. (I loved all those mail order book clubs, especially with the "get ten books for a dollar" come-ons.)

To Kill the Dead was my gateway drug to the Lee's work and over the next year or so, I read pretty much every book she'd written. Then I started tracking down the short stories. When Joy Sillesen, Joanne Renaud, and I started Dark Valentine Magazine, Tanith was one of our inspirations and the first issue featured an illustration of her namesake goddess. 

I love Tanith's gorgeous writing style which in other hands could have been just so much purple prose. I love some of her titles--Drinking Sapphire Wine is a particular favorite. I don't remember the plot of that book now, but I do love the title. And a lot of her covers are gorgeous. The book that I've most often wanted to see turned into a movie is her book The Silver Metal Lover. It was YA before YA was really a "thing.' And what most fans of the book may not know is that there's a sequel to it. If you're a fan of dystopian futures and star-crossed lovers, check it out.

K is for Katherine Kurtz

Now that Game of Thrones is a huge success, and in the wake of the tremendous success of Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit movies, I want someone to finally take note of Katherine Kurtz' Deryni Chronicles. I loved those books and read everyone of them, including the offshoot novels about Camber of Culdi. Here's a site where you can see cover art and read synopses of the books which have all the intrigue, magic, and complicated family relationships you could ever want.

I'm also a fan of Kurtz' lesser-known novel Lammas Night, which is set during WW2 and deftly mixes magic and the mundane in a story that feels real, even though it's about a coven of witches who band together to save their country from a German invasion. Read the book and imagine Prince Harry as the novel's heroic prince.

K is for King, Stephen

There are people (usually people who haven't read much of his work) who get snarky about Stephen King. They like to pigeon-hole him in genre categories (because they think people who write horror or any other genre fiction aren't really very good writers).  These people are missing out. 

I believe that King is the Charles Dickens of our time and I especially admire him for his amazing characters. I could list dozens of memorable characters but I think anyone who wants to understand the art of making an unsympathetic character sympathetic should read Green Mile. If you know the story, you know that one of the characters is a child murderer (and worse). And yet by the time he suffers his terrible fate, I was crying. Yes, Stephen King made me cry.

I'm glad I started reading him when I did because his body of work is now so large that I'm not sure I could ever catch up. And when he announced his retirement a few years back, I was one of those who raised a chorus of "OH NO!!"  He really is the hardest working man in fiction. And speaking of, his book about writing (On Writing) is a must-have, but the notes he writes in his short-story collections are really fascinating.

Silly as it is, I always kind of liked the idea that his birthday (September 21) was like mine, only backwards (September 12).

J is for James Joyce

I have read James Joyce's masterwork Ulysses. And honestly, all I can remember of it is Molly Bloom's joyously sensual "soliloquy of yes." I saw it performed as part of a one-woman show called James Joyce's Women and it was amazing. Hs novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and his short story collection Dubliners are much more accessible. I'm pretty sure I've read Finnegan's Wake also but it's been erased from my memory as completely as if it was never there. Pity. Because I'm pretty sure I'll never revisit it.

If you don't know the soliloquy, here it is.

J is for Jackson, Shirley

I revere Shirley Jackson. I think "The Lottery" is a dandy short story but for my money, The Haunting of Hill House is the best haunted house novel ever written--and I've read more than a few.  And just in case you're looking for some haunted house stories, here are some I've read and recommend:

Stephen King:  The Shining

Okay, technically, it isn't a haunted HOUSE story, but let's not quibble.

Susan Hill:  The Woman in Black

I was a bit  disappointed by the movie, although I thought it was wonderfully eerie and atmospheric. And Daniel Radcliffe is picking interesting parts post-Harry Potter.

Dorothy Macardle: The Uninvited

I saw the movie version of the book (which was published in 1941) and the ghostly special effects were terrific.

Alexandra Sokoloff:  The Harrowing

I'm a big fan of Sokoloff's writing, and I enjoyed this haunted college story tremendously.

But we were discussing Shirley Jackson and The Haunting of Hill House.  I went looking for an imaage of the novel's cover and found a whole lot of them, some of which seemed wildly off the mark, like this one that looks like it might be an English comedy of manners. (The cover at the top left is the cover of the edition I remember reading. I bought it used for ten cents at a local library sale.)

The writing in this book is just so beautifully done. Chilling and simple (like "The Lottery") and yet also poetic, especially in the final words.  If you've never read this book, read it.

I is for "I Hear America Singing" by Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman and his friend  Peter Doyle

I don't read much poetry now. Just about the only poetry I've read since leaving college is the poetry of Pablo Neruda--I was introduced to his work by a poetry placard on the bus--and Seamus Heaney's gorgeous version of Beowulf.

When I was in school, though, I had a really interesting course in which we read John Dos Passos' USA Trilogy, Studs Terkel's book Working (I was a big fan of his kind of journalism) and the poetry of Walt Whitman, specificlly "I Hear America Singing." (We also read Carl Sandburg's poem about Chicago.) I liked Whitman because he wasn't sing-songy. He used words like a painter uses pigments and when his masterwork, "Leaves of Grass" came out, it was labeled obscene when in fact it was simply sensual.