26

Last year I caught the '25 things about me' bug on Facebook, and one of my 25 was an attempt to list my 25 favorite authors. I managed to come up with a list of 26, none of whom I could bring myself to cut. The list still looks pretty good to me today: Austen, Balzac, Büchner, John Dickson Carr, Chekhov, Conrad, Dickens, Diderot, Dostoevsky, Dumas, Marguerite Duras, Euripides, Freud, Henry James, Kafka, Kleist, Marx, Thich Nhat Hanh, Nietzsche, Plato, Ruth Rendell, Sade, Schiller, Shakespeare, Simenon, Wodehouse. I propose in future posts, from time to time, to blog about the 26, one by one, and to recommend examples of their work. (Hence the link to Duras' North China Lover in the column to the right.)