It is not unusual for readers to discuss their favorite books and authors. Until recently I never really categorized those separately—my favorite books were written by my favorite authors. Over the years a few authors and books have floated to the top of my “all-time favorites” list. Goodies like F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Irving are staples on my personal favorites list. They are notable authors for certain, but in my case there is a distinctive catch.

I’ve never been able to read more than one of their books.

The Great Gatsby is by far the most re-read book in my collection as I have frolicked through its pages upwards of four times now. No other book in the universe has passed through my ready hands on so many occasions. I always have a distinct urge to read my favorite books time and again, but I rarely indulge with so many new-to-me tomes languishing on my shelves calling to me, and generally making me feel guilty. Fitzgerald, though, is an unmistakable treat. Every time I crack the proverbial spine on Gatsby I notice something I missed before; some bit of symbolism or an especially affecting turn of phrase. The buzz of the Jazz Age is alive in its pages in colorful language and crackling detail.

By seven o’clock the orchestra has arrived—no thin five-piece affair but a whole pit full of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos and low and high drums. The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing upstairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors and hair shorn in strange new ways and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The bar is in full swing and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside until the air is alive with chatter and laughter and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other’s names.

The kink really comes with the fact that, while I would love to crown Fitzy my favorite author of all-time based solely on writing like the passage above, no matter how many times I attempt it, I cannot force myself to read his other novels, specifically Tender is the Night. Every time I open Tender is the Night and begin to explore the life of psychiatrist Dick Diver and his former patient turned wife, Nicole, a great wave of sleepiness comes over me, and I promptly ditch the book by the bedside before being put away in the morning and forgotten for another five years. I love Gatsby precisely for its lush description of 1920s indulgence and its mixture of loveable and detestable characters. Somehow, even though Tender is the Night contains similar characters and similar themes (or so I hear), they bore me, frustrate me, and generally turn me off. It is a combination of “been there, done that” reading and a pure distaste for the plot. After a good three tries, I officially give up.

The case is much the same with John Irving. As an undergraduate student I laid hands on my first (and only) Irving novel, The Cider House Rules. I was so enthralled, so utterly captivated, by the plight of the orphaned Homer Wells, the pushy Dr. Larch, and the children of the St. Cloud’s orphanage that they seemed quite real to me in all their joys and pain.

He could see Dr. Larch at the typewriter; the doctor wasn’t writing; there wasn’t even any paper in the machine. Dr. Larch was just looking out the window. In the doctor’s trancelike expression Homer recognized the peaceful distance that ether provided in those moments when Homer had found the doctor “just resting” in the dispensary. Perhaps the state of mind that ether occasionally allowed Dr. Larch to enjoy was, increasingly, a state of mind that Larch could summon by just looking out the window. Homer assumed that Dr. Larch used a little ether because he was in some kind of pain; he suspected that almost everyone at St. Cloud’s was in some kind of pain, and that Larch, as a doctor, was especially qualified in remedying it.

Irving’s creations are those rare characters that felt so completely lifelike upon reading that they still pop into my head on occasion, fully formed, inviting me to sit down for chowder and conversation. Upon turning the last page of The Cider House Rules, I wanted to begin again immediately for its lush descriptions and the immersive quality of the writing—a sure sign of an unforgettable book. My subsequent attempts at Irving’s work have not been so successful. I found A Prayer for Owen Meany so screechily unbearable that I barely made it to page 50. A Widow for One Year and The World According to Garp never managed to grab me and also remain unfinished with a bookmark hovering eternally around page 35. The lush descriptions that I relished in The Cider House Rules seem overwhelmingly weighty and oppressive in his other books. Alas, I’ve thrown in the towel on Irving for the time being.

So how is it—my anal retentive, bookish heart wonders—that I could possibly claim to know Fitzgerald and Irving intimately enough through their novels to call them favorite authors? Certainly, these are two of my favorite books, but I cannot claim to understand the subtle nuances in their respective bodies of work based on these two novels alone.

Paul Auster, on the other hand, is an author whose work I am in the process of getting to know. In his case I started backwards by picking up his memoir, Hand to Mouth, followed by another memoir, The Red Notebook, and Paul Auster: The Collected Prose, which contains memoir, poetry, and a number of critical essays. Only after I read about Auster, the man, did I begin to delve into Auster the novelist and subsequently, Auster as a character. What I have come to expect from his fiction is a preoccupation with the role of the writer as a detective and the writer as a godlike figure. He often interjects himself or a caricature of himself (sometimes literally named Paul Auster) into his fiction. In a review of his most recent novel, Man in the Dark, The Independent referred to his style as “a hall of mirrors,” as it reflects the author and it reflects our contemporary times, but the real and the imagined bleed into one another and disorient the reader. Based on my reading thus far I can predict, to some extent, what I will find in the next of his novels that I pick up. It could be any of them, since I own every novel he has written to date. Unlike Fitzgerald and Irving, I am enamored of Auster’s body of work as a whole—the permeating sense of the unreal, the anecdotes that bleed over from his memoirs into his fiction, and the references he makes to classic authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne.

One book does not a favorite author make. Or so says the overly analytical side of my brain. The practical everyday reader in my cranium argues, “No! It doesn’t matter. No one cares but you.” And the practical side is quite right. I daresay there is not a single human on this planet who would care if I listed my literary one-hit wonders alongside those authors I read thoroughly. But I know, and it is one of those niggling thoughts, one of those senseless worries of the truly bookishly obsessive. It is a concern for the type, like myself, who make lists incessantly and keep track of how many pages read per year. Tiny factoids and accounts that form a representation of our reading days. Surely there is a pill for this somewhere.

Alas, it all boils down to a personal discovery—a realization that there is a difference between those authors we date and those authors we marry. Some authors can delight us so thoroughly with one novel that they ruin us on everything else that comes after. Other authors seem to require a commitment; they interest readers so intensely that they become a habit. While both have their charms, I think I like the commitment. While I may not enjoy all of the offerings from Auster I will continually come back to his work for more because it is worth the effort and an occasional compromise. And my favorite books will continue to leap through my imagination even though I may never go out on a second date with Fitzgerald or Irving.

Books Mentioned in This Column:

The Cider House Rules (Ballantine, 1997)

Collected Prose: Autobiographical Writings, True Stories, Critical Essays, Prefaces, and Collaborations with Artists (Picador, 2005)

The Great Gatsby (Scribner, 1999)

Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure (Picador, 2003)

Man in the Dark (Henry Holt & Co., 2008)

A Prayer for Owen Meany (Ballantine, 1990)

The Red Notebook: True Stories (New Directions Publishing, 2002)

Tender is the Night (Scribner, 1995)

A Widow for One Year (Modern Library, 2003)

The World According to Garp (Modern Library, 1998)


Andi is a recovering university academic employed by the North Carolina community college system as an English instructor. While she decided to forego a Ph.D. and career as a professor, she fills in all the free time her current position affords her with editing literary publications, reviewing, freelancing, and blogging at Tripping Toward Lucidity: Estella’s Revenge. Her work can be found in the journal, Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS), and Altar magazine as well as online in various venues such as PopMatters.com. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC), and writes fiction. Her turn-ons include new books and gelato, while her turn-offs are reality television and washing dishes. Contact Andi.