It takes a while to discover which authors you might call ‘favorites.’ I, for one, tend to bounce from book to book, rarely lingering on a single author unless they wrote classics.
Charles Dickens has been a favorite author of mine from the start—I read A Christmas Carol every Christmas Eve!—but apart from him, I have never thought, “I need to read all the books this person wrote.” There are too many to choose from, I think, to not allow room to explore.
At last, however, I have found some authors who—while I hesitate to call them favorites—I would want to read their books over and over. It’s their writing style; it’s the way they build the worlds in their novels.
Why don’t I call them favorites? I don’t know; I’ve always had an easier time picking favorite novels than favorite authors. After all, an author might have one really great book, while their others are mediocre; I still like them, but are they a favorite?
Have you ever grappled with the question of a favorite author? I would love to hear if you settled on one, and if so, what you love most about them!
Featured is a photo of a shelf with some of the authors I would read again. (There are more, but their books are on my Kindle!)
Mariella Hunt 
I never have favorites. Favorite novels, favorite authors, favorite anythings. That said, I sometimes call something I really, really like in a special way (even if there are a dozen or a hundred others I like just as much and in just as special a way) a favorite. For favorite authors, I would say George MacDonald and Mercedes Lackey. I haven’t read everything George MacDonald wrote, but I read a lot, and I have super-loved almost all of it (I even uploaded some of it as PDFs to my blog). I haven’t read everything Mercedes Lackey wrote either, but I have rather liked almost everything I have read, and I can’t describe how much I liked her The Last Herald-Mage Trilogy. She may not be a Christian (George MacDonald is), but when she writes about Death and Life and sometimes other things it seems so Christian – more Christian than a lot of things that are explicitly or superficially Christian. That’s actually something both George MacDonald and Mercedes Lackey have in common: the view of Death that comes through in their writings is absolutely not dismal or morbid. The vision of the loving God and the Resurrection shines through the way they write about Death – at least, to me. I seem to be fascinated by novels about Death in that not-dismal way!
Which George MacDonald book do you recommend?
It depends what you are looking for. I really enjoyed Lilith. That’s probably one of my favorite. I really liked his short stories The Light Princess and The Cruel Painter if you want something short. Umm, yeah, I’d say Lilith, but it’s not your typical Fantasy novel. At the Back of the North Wind is a good more of a children’s story.
I’ll look into them! Thanks!
:)