The My Favorite Writers TAG!

[@carolynmorgan9642]

Your “Hello BookTube” immediately makes me feel calm and relaxed. I watch your videos after work, and it’s like all the stress melts away with those two words!

[@saintdonoghue]

Glad I can help!

[@ThatReadingGuy28]

Agreed

[@f.craigcallahan9609]

Six "not quite" (no particular order): Gabriel García Márquez Julio Cortázar Stanisław Lem Marguerite Duras William Gaddis Joan Didion Four "maybe": Robert Stone Thomas McGuane William Gass Anita Brookner Top five: 5. Thomas Pynchon 4. Henry James 3. Margaret Atwood 2. William Faulkner 1. Virginia Woolf

[@jenniferbrooks]

Oh, Steve, if everyone in the world is tagged, I suppose I must film this video!! Wonderful choices. I often forget about Ovid because I am one of those mainstream Latin students who had to translate Virgil and thus, fell in love with him. For me, other Latin poetry just does not measure up. I need to rectify that and reread Ovid and Horus soon. I'm shocked by some you left out and some you rated so highly. What a great way to get a view into your mind!

[@whatpageareyouon]

When you said Jane Austen, my soul left my body. I shut the book I was reading, turned off all of the lights in my apartment, tapped around my bookshelves for all of my Austen’s-recognizing them only by how the covers feel-hauled them upstairs with me, got under the covers, and am going to BED And *ahem that’s THIRTY ONE years !

[@saintdonoghue]

I knew it would be rough on you - I'm hoping you eventually recover!

[@InsertLiteraryPunHere]

I take the necessary amount of offense, thank you very much!

[@saintdonoghue]

The heart wants what it wants! But now YOU have to do this tag!

[@JuanReads]

I love that this is now a tag, but I’m terrified to do it!

[@saintdonoghue]

You must! Right now, I'm all alone out here withstanding the barrage of "What about Dante?" "What about Chaucer?" "What about Shakespeare?" emails! I need company!

[@JuanReads]

@@saintdonoghue But, I don't want to get those kinds of emails!? However, it can't be easy being alone out there. So, we'll see!

[@MayberryBookclub]

I just discovered your channel and this is terrific! I love your candor and really enjoyed your varied list of favorites. I'm looking forward to watching more of your videos.

[@RunwrightReads]

I was surprised to not hear Trollope mentioned and your favorite list came as a bit of a surprise. Maybe because you were limited by a number? I think you should do a part 2 to this video where you just list the rest of your favorites, because we know there are more

[@bookishben8486]

Hey Steve, I’ve been watching for a while and never commented, I just wanted to say what a huge fan I am of your content, and your selfless devotion to entertaining us with multi video daily uploads! I also love your Browning love, and I agree that it’s outrageous that he’s been so neglected. I think the dramatis... monologues are beautiful and I particularly love Abt Vogler with its long winding dactyls and rhythms. What a poem! What are your favourites? Also love Tennyson, and was somewhat surprised to see him pop up in a Bond film. I have parts of Ulysses committed to memory as well, and I love Idylls of the king. I live near Tintagel , home of the cave Tennyson dubiously dubbed merlins cave which features in the poem. I’m so happy to see the love you show for the Victorians, particularly the poets! I’ll have to think about this tag. It’s really difficult! I do think Graham Greene would feature in top 5, Flannery O’Connor for everything, letters and non fiction included. definitely blake too, and maybe Manley Hopkins. But I’ll have to do some serious thinking. Thanks again Steve, for the thought provoking question, and content in general!

[@saintdonoghue]

Flannery O'Connor came an INCH away from making this list!

[@bookishben8486]

Oh no, poor flannery! It seems a place in Steve's faves is hard to find!

[@jimsbooksreadingandstuff]

In 2021, I merely read 70 books but each was by a different author...I loved Toni Morrison's Beloved but can I rank her as a favorite author when I've only read one of her books? Emily Bronte might rank as a 'maybe', she only finished one novel, the outstanding Wuthering Heights but I do love her poetry especially the Old Stoic... My favorite read of last year was We The Drowned by Carsten Jensen but again its the only book of his I've read... I've read more books by Dick Francis than any other author (around 30) but that was just because my first wife who was into horses and horse racing had most of them... My only experience of reading in Latin was Caesar's Helvetian Wars and the opening of Virgil's Aeneid, neither of which I particularly liked...but I wasn't enamored by what I had to read at school, even Shakespeare and Dickens who I later came to appreciate.

[@aminthereader8946]

Good Tag! Not really all that surprised after watching so many of your videos. But I've chosen to completely blank out you said VW.

[@severalgecko]

I actually couldn't do this tag. I'm such a literary tourist that I haven't really dug into one particular author's bibliography enough to consider them a favourite in any meaningful way.

[@davidstinson9178]

A while ago you proposed a Roman Lit read along featuring Livy, Horace, Ovid, etc. Then for some reason unknown to me, you put the quash on it. Since these are authors I've never read and would dearly love to read, I wish you would reconsider and do this read along this fall or winter. I would love to hear your comments on these authors that you hold in such high regard. Good News: Bernard DeVoto books (The Course of Empire, Across the Wide Missouri, The Year of Decision: 1846) are still in print and are available at Amazon and in your local book store. Also The Uneasy Chair: a biography of Bernard DeVoto by Wallace Stegner sounds interesting. Another bio on my TBR.

[@saintdonoghue]

A nice big Romanalong? That's not a bad idea ...

[@cwel1978]

Which translation of Ovid's Metamorpheses do you recommend?

[@ryanthomas7119]

The Horace Gregory translation is the one I have heard him say he likes best.

[@jade7398]

Favourite historian: Jacques Le Goff Favourite fiction writers: Tolkien, Homer and Tolstoy.

[@jamesholder13]

Awesome video!

[@acruelreadersthesis5868]

No Shakespeare?!

[@aminthereader8946]

Actually more surprised no Chaucer.

[@rishwiz9]

Shakespeare shud definitely be there considering his works are still so influential in our contemporary world.

[@meto2854]

Hey Steve. Great video! I am looking to read my first George Eliot, and I was wondering whether you could recommend where to dig in? I wanna build up before I get to Middlemarch, but some say it’s the best place to start with her. Much appreciated!

[@saintdonoghue]

Surely this calls for a Middlemarch read-along?

[@meto2854]

Steve Donoghue hey I would LOVE TO DO IT! My abebooks order is sadly stopped until they decide to ship again, but I can pick up a random copy of it from my local bookstore. Mind you I can’t read 150p an hour lol. Let me know!

[@claudiaferreira585]

Taggeg everybody in the world?! My answers will be entirely different tomorow, and I'm not quite as well read as I would like! Great tag, great communicator, love your videos ❤️ NOT QUITE Marguerite Yourcenar Joseph Conrad John Steinbeck Vasily Grossman Doris Lessing Rose Tremain MAYBE George Eliot Gore Vidal Fyodor Dostoievsky Charles Dickens FAVORITES Malcolm Lowry Mario Vargas Llosa Virginia Woolf Jorge Luis Borges Herman Hesse

[@Tolstoy111]

Not to be a pedant but Washington Irving wrote "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" which included the Headless Horseman character. A novel called "The Headless Horseman" was written by Thomas Mayne Reid.

[@allisontaylor6095]

Great tag! I'm going to give it a try since you tagged "everyone in the world!"

[@jackohara8993]

No Russians 😢 ... Maybe Fyodor or Leo could be on the “not quite, not quite” ... ?

[@marke6638]

I was waiting for Patrick O'Brian but he never arrived.

[@ThatReadingGuy28]

I would write my answers here in the comments but I have not read nearly enough to do that. Give me 5-10 years and I'll come back here just to submit my answers.

[@saintdonoghue]

By my calculations, in 5-10 years I'll be 28.

[@ThatReadingGuy28]

Steve Donoghue it must feel nice to never age, doesn't it? Maybe in the future you can convince penguin classics to publish an anthropology of your writing material? For a 28 year old, you sure have written a lot.

[@ryandonagan2628]

@@ThatReadingGuy28 That was a typo on Steve's part, He meant 82

[@mitchelaxler7656]

NOT QUITE: Albert Jay Nock D H Lawrence Shakespeare Nassim Nicholas Taleb Felipe Fernandez-Armesto Eliot Weinberger MAYBE: Melville Yeats Solzhenitsyn Lao Tzu and the author of Ecclesiastes TOP FIVE: Dostoevsky Ludwig Wittgenstein John Blofeld Georges Simenon (the "roman durs", Maigret is just a bonus) Bruce Olds

[@irena7777777]

What's your favourite Simenon?

[@mitchelaxler7656]

The Train; Dirty Snow; Teddy Bear

[@irena7777777]

@@mitchelaxler7656 Thanks

[@jonnaah9683]

I don't have a favorite or a list of favorites. For me the notion of favorites is flawed. Or at least standing favorites. I felt Twain was my favorite at age 12 to 15. I read lots of him, including travel and essays Then I had new favorites as I discovered and read them. I have had a series of current favorites, and went on. I long held Twain as my sentimental favorite, and I still feel that sentiment when the subject comes up. I've had numerous flings with authors, read several books and later come back to them. But I'm more interested in discovering the new, which does include reading unread books by previous flings. It would be meaningless to make a long list of those authors. Or individual books, for that matter. Maybe when I'm all excited about a book I'm reading, it and its author are now my favorite, because if they aren't, then wouldn't I rather lay the book down and go to the supposed real favorite? There are undoubtedly more undiscovered favorites to come.

[@acruelreadersthesis5868]

Glad you turned this into a tag!

[@saintdonoghue]

So you'll do it? Today?

[@acruelreadersthesis5868]

Soon, I imagine 😉

[@OldBluesChapterandVerse]

Doesn’t DeVoto have some kind of connection to Wallace Stegner? I agree re: Tennyson: modern sensibilities could loosen up a little. 😉 This is like the Booktube Top Tens Tag - but with authors!

[@aminthereader8946]

Knowledge of the classics and history and the Bible is really down, so who will understand the rich imagery, the tone and the texture and the feel of his poetry? I think the politics side is just excuse making to cover up all the inadequacies that have crept up.

[@saintdonoghue]

You know, this could very well be true. Politics aside, the just-general-education levels of the Western world have precipitously declined in the last 35 years or more. Most people are no longer really taught history, poetry, or the Bible in school - and what's a poet like Tennyson without those three things?

[@gaildoughty6799]

Eliot a Maybe? Austen a Not Quite? What???? And you’ve left out AT! My dear man, what are you thinking? On the other hand, I love your choices of Tennyson, Wolfe, Irving. And Ovid...yum.

[@RobotPorter]

Many of the books (and authors) you say are out of print are available via Kindle, Project Gutenberg, etc.. I know many book people have an aversion to ebooks and eReaders. But all lovers of obscure literature need to reconsider that position.

[@blessOTMA]

Indeed, Project Gutenberg is a treasure trove!💗

[@jemgem9593]

Great tag 🐺🌞

[@arminie9400]

German historians are an extremely serious bunch.

[@toddthelibrarian1289]

Hmmmmm . . . Cheers Steve!

[@BookishTexan]

Erasmus is only your number three!!

[@HelenUtzinge]

Off the top of my head, fiction: Balzac, Melville, Nabokov. Nothing written in Latin Steve, sorry, no can do.

[@brittabohlerthesecondshelf]

Soooo, now you take issue with German historians? Bold move. You are only saved from hell by naming McCarthy in your top 5.

[@etucker82]

You have very old school tastes. Mine are 'middle school.' At this moment: Favorites: Whoever wrote The Bible Pushkin Chekhov Shakespeare Montaigne Clive James Naguib Mahfouz Bohumil Hrabal Isaac Bashevis Singer (the richness of the last three belong among this mighty company) Isaiah Berlin Eric Hoffer Essayists: Almosts: Dickens G. Eliot Vasily Grossman Flaubert Naipaul Cather Turgenev Jaroslav Hasek Orwell Alexander Herzen Boccaccio Cervantes Chaucer Amos Elon Saramago Vidal Oswald Spengler Arthur Koestler I think that's enough.... I refuse to choose.

[@joniheisenberg6691]

Philip Roth Toni Morrison Amor Towles Henry Miller Andrew Roberts David Blight

[@johncrwarner]

We are judging you now.....

[@saintdonoghue]

I know! I can feel it! I need more people to do this tag and EXPOSE themselves!

[@southernbiscuits1275]

To make a contest of what authors individuals like the most is rather gauche. Reading is and should always be a personal activity. To lower the importance of reading into a game on BookTube is not anything I would expect a serious reader to do. I have my favorite authors that, I dare say, would cause quite raucous laughter from the effete elites of BookTube. However, what I feel is important is not what authors I enjoy but rather that I read at all. We live in an age when a past president proved himself to be bereft of reading skills. What matters is that people read. What they consider "important" is purely subjective and without importance. What IS important is the open, questioning mind that bothers to read at all. Now, with all that being said, no, Steve, I do not believe you are serious in your attitude towards what authors people read. But, I do feel it is worthwhile to mention that reading is more serious than choosing authors like one would choose a team in a sporting event. So, Hail to thee, blithe Steve. May your videos rise higher still and higher! LOLOLOL!!!

[@hughminor9369]

1. Ernest Hemingway 2. Jules Verne 3. Lester Dent 4. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 5 Agatha Christie. 6. Mark Twain 7.Theodore Roosevelt 8. Ian Fleming.

[@mame-musing]

🧐No surprise the Romans dominated the field 📜

[@saintdonoghue]

Hah! I hadn't noticed that, but I'll gladly admit to it! As my old friends always used to tease, "Dogs, dead Romans, and dead Kennedys"! But a list of 'best' instead of 'favorites' might have been more balanced!

[@KK-dl8mb]

Your books exposing ur age😁I meant the quantity behind you❤️

[@EveryoneWhoReadsitMustConverse]

A Tag it is! Run on brother...awesome selections and check mine