Lethem, McEwan and My Favorite Authors

I own too many books but I'm buying another on Tuesday.

Yesterday, I finished reading The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem, and today I read a review of Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach, also written by Jonathan Lethem.

Lethem has become one of my favorite authors, and his description of McEwan's new novel warrants a purchase, which means I'll have two McEwan books on my book tower...

The bulk of “On Chesil Beach” consists of a single sex scene, one played, because of the novel’s brevity and accessibility, in something like “real time.” Edward and Florence have retreated, on their wedding night, to a hotel suite overlooking Chesil Beach. Edward wants sex, Florence is sure she doesn’t. The situation is miniature and enormous, dire and pathetic, tender and irrevocable. McEwan treats it with a boundless sympathy, one that enlists the reader even as it disguises the fact that this seeming novel of manners is as fundamentally a horror novel as any McEwan’s written, one that carries with it a David Cronenberg sensitivity to what McEwan calls “the secret affair between disgust and joy.” That horror is located in the distance between two selves, two subjectivities: humans who will themselves to be “as one,” and fail miserably.

Yesterday, I put together a list of my favorite active authors, and here they are:

Bill Bryson
Cormac McCarthy
David Sedaris
Don DeLillo
J.K. Rowling
John Irving
John Updike
Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan Safran Foer
Michael Chabon
Neil Gaiman
Phillip Roth
Richard Russo
Stephen King
T.C. Boyle

Please post your favorite authors as a comment, so I can find some more books to buy...