The best writer is the one I'm afraid to read because I know it'll ruin me for anything else for a week. The one whose voice is so strong it colonizes my own inner monologue. After I finish a book by someone like China Miéville or Helen Oyeyemi, every other book feels thin and pale for a while. Their linguistic and imaginative density sets a bar.
It's a wonderful, terrible feeling. You're grateful for the experience but also resentful of the reading slump it inevitably induces. That disruptive power is a hallmark of a truly singular talent.
My vote goes to Elena Ferrante. The Neapolitan Novels are a monumental achievement in depicting female friendship, intellect, class, and the passage of time. The raw, unfiltered emotion and the sheer scale of the character journey are unmatched in contemporary fiction I've read.
There's a power in her anonymity, too—it forces the work itself to be the entire focus. The writing feels so urgent and true that it transcends the page. It's a specific, deeply Italian story that somehow feels universal. That's a magic trick only the very best writers can pull off.
The control of information is key. A mystery writer like Agatha Christie parcels out clues with surgical precision, her style clear and unobtrusive so as not to distract from the puzzle. A writer of magical realism like Gabriel García Márquez layers in surreal, wondrous details as mundane facts, his style accepting the impossible without comment. The narrative style trains you how to read the world of the book.
My hot take: Skip the 'classic' classics initially. Dive into modern literary page-turners. Gillian Flynn ('Gone Girl') for dark, twisty thrillers with sharp writing. Celeste Ng ('Little Fires Everywhere') for family dramas that read like gossip but are deeply insightful. They use contemporary language, pace like TV shows, and prove that 'serious' fiction can be unputdownable.
Sometimes the disagreement is generational. What my professors taught as the pinnacle of modernism (Joyce, Woolf) feels less relevant to students today, who might connect more with the fragmented identities in a novel by Helen Oyeyemi or the tech-infused paranoia of a William Gibson.
Scholarly canons change slower than reader tastes. So the 'best' for a 20-year-old reader in 2024 is likely lightyears away from the 'best' in a 1984 Norton Anthology. Agreement would require one group to completely capitulate to the other's timeframe and values, which just isn't going to happen. The present and the past are always in dialogue, but rarely in agreement.
For sheer, sprawling, multi-generational character mapping, you can't beat Charles Dickens, though his style isn't for everyone. He creates these iconic, sometimes caricatured figures, but then he slowly fills in their humanity over hundreds of pages. Pip in 'Great Expectations' is the classic bildungsroman, but the development is in his painful awakening from snobbery and self-delusion to a humbler understanding of loyalty and love. Dickens is a master of showing how environment and chance encounters shape a person's destiny, for good or ill. The emotional payoff when a character like Miss Havisham finally confronts her own wasted life is monumental because of the immense detail he's built around her.
I've always been drawn to authors who can capture the raw emotions of love in their writing. Jane Austen is a timeless favorite, with 'Pride and Prejudice' setting the gold standard for romantic tension and witty dialogue. Nicholas Sparks is another heavyweight, known for his heart-wrenching stories like 'The Notebook' that blend love with life's hardships. For contemporary romance, Emily Henry stands out with her sharp humor and relatable characters in books like 'Beach Read'. Helen Hoang also deserves a shoutout for her fresh take on romance in 'The Kiss Quotient', which beautifully explores love and neurodiversity. These authors have a knack for making readers feel every heartbeat and tear.