The Writers' Lounge

Oh, yes! Some gorgeous choices there. I confess, I like both the concise and artfully spare (Wodehouse, Miller, Steinbeck) and the verbose, though like you I'm not that crazy about Dickens. I always found the Victorian sentimentality he was obliged to leaven things with a bit off-putting but, as Wilde said, one would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell. ;)

For my two cents, the opening to 'Fishboy' by Mark Richard. I love this book, though it's really a kind of Marmite thing. You'll either be absorbed in its lyrical rhythm, gothic dark humour and picaresque horror, or just get fed up of the wurbling and wander off. With that in mind:

"I began as a boy, as a human-being boy, a boy who fled to sea, a boy with a whistling lisp and the silken-tipped fingers of another class. A boy with put-away memories of bedclothes bound tight about the head, knocked by a hammering fist; the smell of cigar and shoe leather and the weighted burlap bag, thrown from a car into a side-road swamp. A child born again there, slithering out of the sack, a new beginning into life, holding back water to breathe through sour mudded filth and green surface slime. Put-away memories of my gums pushed back and bloody gnawing slugroot; the ripped frog muscle spasms tickling my tongue as I ate the things almost whole, and then the all-night chorus of croaking reproach; the bitter-centred snake eggs I washed down with the stagnant sulphured water, a mushroom cap for a cup, all of it heaved back up, a slack-jawed torrent of spew splashing around my ankles, heaving up my own new creations of life in the mire, bits and pieces wiggling and squirming and convulsing, web-footed and scaled, tiny dead reptilian eyes like pretty black beads in pearls."

It's dense but, whoa, it's visceral. The author is from Louisiana, and the whole book - though it doesn't have that denseness all the way through - is wonderfully evocative in its sense of place and experience. (Also: writing like crazy. This is good. Consider me doing the cheerleader pom-pom dance for you. *grin*)