Top Ten Tuesday

Top Ten Favourite Authors In X Genre (Ex- Top Ten Favourite Science Fiction Authors, Top Ten Fave Contemporary YA authors)

Another Tuesday means it's time for me to not be able to fulfil this weeks prompt! This time because ..I never know what genre I'm reading! (I am clearly terrible.) I think I'm going to do Love, so without further ado;  

My Top Ten Favourite Love Story Authors

1) Chuck Palahniuk - For writing love and romance without Hollywood sickliness an adding a dose of realism into his couples. "If you love something set it free, but don't be surprised if it comes back with herpes."

2) Charles Bukowski - He may be a "Dirty Old Man" but I just love the way he writes women and his obsession with chasing them "I was sentimental about many things: a woman’s shoes under the bed; one hairpin left behind on the dresser; the way they said, “I’m going to pee..”’ hair ribbons; walking down the boulevard with them at 1:30 in the afternoon, just two people walking together; the long nights of drinking and smoking; talking; the arguments; thinking of suicide; eating together and feeling good; the jokes; the laughter out of nowhere; feeling miracles in the air; being in a parked car together; comparing past loves at 3am; being told you snore; hearing her snore; mothers, daughters, sons, cats, dogs; sometimes death and sometimes divorce; but always carring on, always seeing it through; reading a newspaper alone in a sandwich joint and feeling nausea because she’s now married to a dentist with an I.Q. of 95; racetracks, parks, park picnics; even jails; her dull friends; your dull friends; your drinking, her dancing; your flirting, her flirting; her pills, your fucking on the side and her doing the same; sleeping together"

3) Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights is the greatest love story ever. (In my opinion!) "My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. So don't talk of our separation again: it is impracticable."

4) Anaïs Nin - Her prose is so dreamy and beautiful, when I read Nin's stories it's always like wading out to sea, her work is utterly captivating. "How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself. "

5) Henry Miller - I adore the hopeless way he writes women, he's jaded but in a way that really works in the stories he tells. "There's something perverse about women... they're all masochists at heart."

6) Lionel Shriver - For We Need To Talk About Kevin, which I find beautiful and captivating in terms of the romantic love story in main protagonists relationship with her husband, but also the issues she faces with familial love in her children. "I realize it's commonplace for parents to say to their child sternly, 'I love you, but I don't always like you.' But what kind of love is that?"

7) Vladimir Nabokov - Because anyone who can make me forget that the relationship I'm reading about is that of a paedophile and a young girl is worthy of this list. "There, on the soft sand, a few feet away from our elders, we would sprawl all morning, in a petrified paroxysm of desire, and take advantage of every blessed quirk in space and time to touch each other: her hand, half-hidden in the sand, would creep toward me, its slender brown fingers sleepwalking nearer and nearer; then, her opalescent knee would start on a long cautious journey"

8) Jane Austen - Who doesn't love period romance? "If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more."

9) Cormac McCarthy - He writes beautiful stories about familial love - The Road being a fantastic example. "Listen to me, he said, when your dreams are of some world that never was or some world that never will be, and you're happy again, then you'll have given up. Do you understand? And you can't give up, I won't let you."

10) George R.R. Martin - For Jon and Ygritte. "There's been no one," he confessed. "Only you."

(P.S. Does anyone watch Downton Abbey? If so I feel we need a discussion group of some sorts because this week KILLED ME!)