Habitual Reader Profiles - Page 2

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	Name: Michael Dutton
	City & State: Newport, Rhode Island
	Vocation / Avocation: Writer, Reader, Dreamer, Renaissance Man

Why I'm a Habitual Reader:

As much as I like a variety of art forms, including the cinema, there are elements in fiction that absolutely cannot be reproduced in other art forms. Example: Before our trip to London (to visit my daughter, Meg, who was schooling there), I re-read "Mrs. Dalloway" by Virginia Woolf. The introductory sequence, involving St. James Park ... well, we were walking away from Trafalgar Square, past Downing Street, by White Hall ... while my wife and daughters watched a changing of the guard nearby, I espied a quite lovely park in the distance. When I asked an English gentleman the name of the park, he replied: "St. James Park" - the rush of imagery from "Mrs. Dalloway" ... well, it was an experience that shall last a life time.

My List of Ten: Fiction

1. Ulysses
Author: James Joyce
The brilliant weave of stream-of-consciousness

2. Hopscotch
Author: Julio Cortazar
Remarkable structural dynamics, coupled with an incomparable elegance of language

3. Our Lady of the Flowers
Author: Jean Genet
Existentialism with floral fragrance

4. The Brothers Karamazov
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevski
Incredible psychological elements
(Also: Crime and Punishment)

5. Labyrinths
Author: Jorge Luis Borges
His short stories are thematic jewels that make the writing of short stories seem oh-so-easy...

6. The Trial
Author: Franz Kafka
A sort of multi-dimensional singularity to the narrator

7. Justine
Author: Lawerence Durrell
The graceful drape of imagery

8. Written on the Body
Author: Jeanette Winterson
What can one say about Jeanette without being redundant: Jeanette's Jeanette (rather brilliant)

9. The Sound and the Fury
Author: William Faulkner
Certainly, the greatest of American writers, who created a veritable mythos of the South

10. Conducting Bodies
Author: Claude Simon
Sartre and Camus, coupled with Robbe-Grillet
Do I have to stop here? There's so many more ...

Have you read any of these titles? Review one now.

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