Booking Through Thursday: What makes your favorite your favorite?

This week’s Booking Through Thursday questions: Think about your favorite authors, your favorite books . . . what is it about them that makes you love them above all the other authors you’ve read? The stories? The characters? The way they appear to relish the taste of words on the tongue? The way they’re unafraid to show the nitty-gritty of life? How they sweep you off to a new, distant place? What is it about those books and authors that makes them resonate with you in ways that other, perfectly good books and authors do not?

I’ve had this running around my head all day, so one would think that would be long enough to arrive at an adequate response. However, one would be wrong.

Yes, it is the stories, the characters, the way their authors appear to relish the taste of words on the tongue, the way they show the nitty-gritty of life, and how they sweep me off to a new, distant place. But it’s something more than that too. It’s a certain je ni se que, an I-don’t-know-what, in other words. When you read it, you just know what it is, but it’s something on which you can’t put your finger.

For me, it can be as complicated as reading the flowing prose of Proust (in small doses), or as simple as reading the staccato dialogue of Robert B. Parker (creator of the Boston detective Spenser). Speaking of dialogue, that is one thing I do enjoy. I always loved Hemingway for that reason. That spare prose, but then like I said, I enjoy the long, flowing prose of Proust too. Maybe it’s the quality of evoking an image with the least amount of details, such as this:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

– In A Station of the Metro, Ezra Pond

Or it might be evoking images upon images with all kinds of details, such as this:

       I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
              madness, starving hysterical naked,
       dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
              looking for an angry fix,
       angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
              connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
              ery of night,
       who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
              up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
              cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
              contemplating jazz,
       who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
              saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
              ment roofs illuminated,
       who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
              hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
              among the scholars of war,
       who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
              publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
              skull...

Howl, Allen Ginsberg

Or it might be all of that, but…

…then again, it might not either. I can’t quite put my finger on it. That’s the beauty of having favorite authors. You just love them, no matter what.