Q&A – Per Jacobsen talks about favorite authors and books

Thank you to everyone who asked a question earlier this week. As mentioned, I’ll be posting his answers here on a regular basis and today I’ll post the first one.

QUESTION:

Per has a very different and unique style. I would like to know who his favorite authors are and what are his favorite all time books?

ANSWER:

Oh, that’s a difficult one to answer. There are a lot of great writers out there. But I’ll try to point out a few that stand out to me.

Stephen King. Let’s just get the big one out of the way first. I don’t think there are many authors in my genres that haven’t plowed through at least a dozen of his books. And yeah, I’ve enjoyed a lot of them, especially in my youth in the nineties. My favorite of his, though, is not even a fiction novel. It’s a book about the craft called “On Writing”. I learned a lot from that book when I started out. Of his fiction novels, I think my winner would be “The Long Walk”.

A couple of classics:
Cormac MccArthy, “The Road”. This is one of my all-time favorite books. He has a very interesting style, and the story is just great. Taught me a lot about how to set the mood of a story using the environment.
Frank McCourt, “Angela’s Ashes”. Besides being both entertaining and bleak, this book is an indirect course in writing great dialogue.
William Golding, “The Lord of the Flies”. Great book. Taught me a lot about symbolism and working in layers.
And my most recent book love affair:
Daniel Kraus, “Whalefall”. I read this book about a month ago, and I loved it. That guy is just at another level. His style is very unique, and it just works on every single layer. The premise is interesting, the prose is sublime and … well, it’s just good. Finding a writer with such a unique (and is this case very minimalistic) style is rare. It felt new.

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Thank you to Dick Flamingo for this interesting question.

– Per Jacobsen