My bookshelf stack of John Irving, with my owls Bernard and Irving keeping watch. John Irving is one of my top ten favorite authors. I fell absolutely head over heels in love with him while reading The World According to Garp, which gave me such a singularly unique and pleasurable feeling during the entire reading that I am scared to ever read it again. I don't want to change the memory. To me, that book is magic. To explain why is impossible without a lengthy essay, but I will say that it evokes a distillation of the life of a writer and parent that is totally fascinating and dark and rich and poignant and uses the purity of dark comedy to expose the way life feels on the inside, while wonderfully illustrating the outside. Other favorites include A Prayer for Owen Meany and A Widow For One Year. The essence of my love for John Irving is his voice. He has a wonderful intelligence, fascinating characters, wonderfully convoluted and interesting plots, the graphic adult life that I like to read about in what I secretly think of as 'real novels' but it is his voice, at once recognizable and completely immersing, that I fell in love with. His phrasings, the way he rides hard on some words repeatedly, the cadence...it's like listening to the best bedtime story ever.
