A partial list, in no particular order, of writers who passed in 2008. Well, kind of an order. Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn – Dissident Russian author and Nobel Prize winner. Feisty SOB. David Foster Wallace – Ubertalented author of Infinite Jest , a book I spent the summer after college living in. Too f*#king young. William F. Buckley Jr. – Lots of people like to use big words when describing Buckley, as he used big words. Not me. Not even to capture his antiegalitarianism. Dammit! Studs Terkel – Chronicler of the American experience, but the real American experience, where you work a crappy job and maybe get a little too pissy at your kids and look for solace at the end of the day in a beer and you lose your house to gentrification, and not the American Experience on PBS that is about famous people. Arthur C. Clarke – Acclaimed British sci-fi writer. He wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey. I don’t read sci-fi, but I pour out my chalice for him. Do they have chalices in sci-fi? Tony Hillerman – Beloved adopted son of New Mexico. Mystery writer and friend of the Diné. Michael Crichton – Creator of “ER,” author of many really famous books. He seemed pretty cool. Clive Barnes – Influential theatre critic. Mahmoud Darwish – Esteemed Palestinian poet. Several of his poems have struck me down.Like I said, a partial list. There are no women on this because I couldn’t find any that I’d ever heard of who’d died. I have my theories on this. So, pick up a book by a living female author and one by one of these guys and read in the new year.
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