I read primarily non-fiction but in search of the kinds of aesthetic, literary, stylistic merits which you seem to associate with fiction and poetry. (For the record, I also have a lit degree, just in case that gives the following any more authority than it would carry otherwise.) As such, here are a few writers of nonfiction I consider worth a look:
Orwell has already been mentioned, and rightly so. Although he’s primarily known for his fiction (especially the Big Two), to me he excels as an essayist and writer of nonfiction. If Politics and the English Language hadn’t already been linked to, I’d be linking it here. He has plenty of other classic essays, though, and his book-length nonfiction is great too. My favourite of these is Homage to Catalonia, which is about as rigorously clear and honest a bit of political reportage as I can conceive of, not to mention being an account of a really interesting part of history (the Spanish civil war).
Borges also springs to mind. Penguin publish a wonderful selection of his essays, and it’s absolutely one of my favourite books—easily as good as his fiction. (I mention his nonfiction since I’m on a roll with that, but really, his fiction is just as stylistically great. Plus, reading Borges’ stories is a mind-expanding and beautiful experience that everyone should go through anyway.) He has this wonderfully understated and laconic prose style, and his subordinate clauses can express ideas that other writers would belabour for a paragraph. His essays cover an unbelievably broad range of topics, discussing, for example, Zeno’s paradox, Citizen Kane, artificial languages, and many, many, many other writers. (He’s so well-read in world literature, and interpolates so much from other writers, that one feels well-read by proxy after being in contact with him.)
I’m a great fan of Douglas Hofstadter, for his linguistic whimsy, puns, form-vs-content gags, and other surface details, but it’s possible that these might not be everyone’s cup of tea.
I’ve also been digging Montaigne lately, whose book Essays is responsible for the noun essay meaning what it does. His style, though, is quite flowery and circumlocutory, interpolating references to a lot of latin and greek. If you’re looking for concision and directness of thought, you probably won’t find it in him. The cultural gulf of all those centuries passing also makes him quite tricky to read. But on the whole I was surprised by how much I felt I had in common with him, and there’s something deeply heartening about finding that across such a deep gulf of time. And he is an important pre-enlightenment source of skepticism, which might be of interest to LW types.
Last but not least, I’ve always held Bertie Russell to have a nice clear, direct style.
If I had to pick out one writer from the above, it would be Borges, with no question.
I’d also note that there is a fairly good cached answer to the question of who the best writers in history are, in the form of the literary canon. You’d do well not to ignore it. Literary types might be quite different to LW types, but their implicit consensus about which writers of the past are worth paying attention to is basically trustworthy, I think. In other words, reading pretty much any ‘classic’ (roughly speaking, ‘well-known work from before the twentieth century or so’) is likely to expand your horizons and teach you something new in terms of style. On the other hand, changes over time in language and culture form barriers to easily reading sufficiently old books, and I suppose one could argue that this outweighs what one stands to gain from it.
Borges also springs to mind. Penguin publish a wonderful selection of his essays, and it’s absolutely one of my favourite books—easily as good as his fiction.
Borges is also my favorite top author, and I also think his nonfiction is at least as good as his fiction, which hardly anyone else does! Were we separated at birth?
We undoubtedly were. I’ve also been enjoying his poetry lately, since I found a nice bilingual edition of that. I can’t read the Spanish, but it’s nice to have it there for comparison’s sake, to be able to see what kinds of choices the translators made.
I read primarily non-fiction but in search of the kinds of aesthetic, literary, stylistic merits which you seem to associate with fiction and poetry. (For the record, I also have a lit degree, just in case that gives the following any more authority than it would carry otherwise.) As such, here are a few writers of nonfiction I consider worth a look:
Orwell has already been mentioned, and rightly so. Although he’s primarily known for his fiction (especially the Big Two), to me he excels as an essayist and writer of nonfiction. If Politics and the English Language hadn’t already been linked to, I’d be linking it here. He has plenty of other classic essays, though, and his book-length nonfiction is great too. My favourite of these is Homage to Catalonia, which is about as rigorously clear and honest a bit of political reportage as I can conceive of, not to mention being an account of a really interesting part of history (the Spanish civil war).
Borges also springs to mind. Penguin publish a wonderful selection of his essays, and it’s absolutely one of my favourite books—easily as good as his fiction. (I mention his nonfiction since I’m on a roll with that, but really, his fiction is just as stylistically great. Plus, reading Borges’ stories is a mind-expanding and beautiful experience that everyone should go through anyway.) He has this wonderfully understated and laconic prose style, and his subordinate clauses can express ideas that other writers would belabour for a paragraph. His essays cover an unbelievably broad range of topics, discussing, for example, Zeno’s paradox, Citizen Kane, artificial languages, and many, many, many other writers. (He’s so well-read in world literature, and interpolates so much from other writers, that one feels well-read by proxy after being in contact with him.)
I’m a great fan of Douglas Hofstadter, for his linguistic whimsy, puns, form-vs-content gags, and other surface details, but it’s possible that these might not be everyone’s cup of tea.
I’ve also been digging Montaigne lately, whose book Essays is responsible for the noun essay meaning what it does. His style, though, is quite flowery and circumlocutory, interpolating references to a lot of latin and greek. If you’re looking for concision and directness of thought, you probably won’t find it in him. The cultural gulf of all those centuries passing also makes him quite tricky to read. But on the whole I was surprised by how much I felt I had in common with him, and there’s something deeply heartening about finding that across such a deep gulf of time. And he is an important pre-enlightenment source of skepticism, which might be of interest to LW types.
Last but not least, I’ve always held Bertie Russell to have a nice clear, direct style.
If I had to pick out one writer from the above, it would be Borges, with no question.
I’d also note that there is a fairly good cached answer to the question of who the best writers in history are, in the form of the literary canon. You’d do well not to ignore it. Literary types might be quite different to LW types, but their implicit consensus about which writers of the past are worth paying attention to is basically trustworthy, I think. In other words, reading pretty much any ‘classic’ (roughly speaking, ‘well-known work from before the twentieth century or so’) is likely to expand your horizons and teach you something new in terms of style. On the other hand, changes over time in language and culture form barriers to easily reading sufficiently old books, and I suppose one could argue that this outweighs what one stands to gain from it.
Borges is also my favorite top author, and I also think his nonfiction is at least as good as his fiction, which hardly anyone else does! Were we separated at birth?
We undoubtedly were. I’ve also been enjoying his poetry lately, since I found a nice bilingual edition of that. I can’t read the Spanish, but it’s nice to have it there for comparison’s sake, to be able to see what kinds of choices the translators made.