What authors do you recommend on the basis of writing style?
I'm in the middle of writing my thesis and I've been (re)reading some excellent, unconventional style guides (The Sense of Style by Stephen Pinker and Stylish Academic Writing by Helen Sword). I'm also rereading Thank You for Arguing by Jay Heinrichs, which is less about style but is essentially a guide for effective communication.
In reading these books and applying their teachings to my writing, I've been reinvigorated with a passion for writing, namely for the craftsmanship of prose. All three books analyze excerpts from examples of great (and sometimes poor) writing. But, I'm now looking for a more immersive experience in good (i.e. stylish, evocative, concise etc.) writing in the hopes that, with my newly refined perspective and sensitivity, I can improve my own writing even more. Good writers read good writing.
Now, starting new books now won't help my current cause (my thesis) but my academic career will call for much more writing in the future. And I'm hoping that maybe the suggestions I get here will help me prioritize my current queue of books and articles—I know they're all great books but I'd like to read the ones with better writing, first.
So, I would love some recommendations on authors who you would consider as masters of writing. It can be either books or articles. Preferably non-fiction and modern (20 years?), only because fiction and older books have different standards (FWIW I love old-school sci-fi, but that's definitely not the style I'm after). My current shortcut is to read basically any "longread" on WIRED, as most of the time they are high quality and often explain complex topics.
Any other resources are also welcome! Though maybe no more style guides...
However trite and over-mentioned, I'm going to put George Orwell up for your consideration.
I still find Orwell's Politics and the English Language worth reading for its prose, not just as a style guide. The essay is certainly open to criticism for some of its content, like the objections to use of foreign phrases. And yet, given the context of his times, we should probably forgive Orwell's excessive zeal in defense of English, particularly in view of our own corrupted usages.
There are resonant passages from both his fiction and non-fiction writing:
Oh man, I totally meant to read this. It's been a minute since I read Orwell so he totally slipped my mind. Thanks for the great excerpts!
I'll also contribute by mentioning some examples off the top of my head:
Richard Dawkins, Stephen Pinker, Carl Sagan, Douglas Hoffstadter (well, at least in GEB) and Malcolm Gladwell. Dawkins' and Sagan's writing in particular have deeply inspired me and given me great pleasure. Sometimes rereading a paragraph for another hit of dopamine. Gladwell is an excellent storyteller.
Matthew Desmond. Evicted was devastating and evocative.
Oh, and Barry Lopez. Kind of quiet and melancholic. Oh, and Annie Dillard and Eliot Weinberger.
Certainly a bit left-of-field with regards to nonfiction writing. Eliot Weinberger, in particular, has a very quasi-poetic style. Beautiful, though, if you're open to it.
I'd recommend Crossing Open Ground by Lopez (only one I've read), For the Time Being by Dillard (though all her stuff is great), and An Elemental Thing by Weinberger. To start, at least. These are good writers!
And, though you specified non-fiction, I'd give How Fiction Works by James Woods a go. Covers a lot on style.
Oooh, I might actually be interested in that book anyways—I'd love to learn more about the mechanics of "fictional" storytelling. It's not appreciated much by academia, but effective communication of hard science relies on good storytelling, too. This was made explicit by Helen Sword—characters can be molecules and antagonists can be research problems...
Mary Roach is wonderfully readable and fills her writing with noteworthy details, cheeky humor, and resonant observations. Her books are always a great time.
Dava Sobel has a very unique non-fiction writing style. I loved Longitude, which is the book of hers that gets the most attention, but The Planets was also great. It felt like non-fiction poetry in places.
Kazuo Ishiguro is a fiction author, and I've only read one book by him, but I mention him here because even though it's been years since I read Never Let Me Go, I still remember how it had breathtakingly good prose.
Mark Forsyth's The Etymologicon is a wonderful dive into style as well. The book is a love letter to words, told by a man whose obvious love for language comes through on every page.
For non-fiction, let me also recommend Jon Krakauer, whose Into the Wild remains one of my favorite books:
Michael Ruhlman's The Making of a Chef, and his collaboration with Thomas Keller in The French Laundry Cookbook, contain extraordinarily evocative prose, even outside the confines of the food genre:
I'm currently reading D'un château l'autre (Castle to Castle) by Céline. It's one of his later books (after WW2) in which his style is fully developed. It's very oral and elliptic, very pungent. I don't know if there's equivalents in English, and although I don't think one should just copy his style, there's definitively some ideas there when it comes to cutting things short and grabbing the reader by the throat. It's a bit difficult at first though.
Here's an excerpt, context is Vichy government in exile in Germany and this guy Clotilde tries to escape to Switzerland with his new found lover :
My favorite authorial writing style is Douglas Adams'. Based on the authors you listed, you may already have some familiarity with him. His prose is snappy, economical, witty, and wry. Also extremely British. Here's a section from his most popular novel to give you some idea of what to expect:
Excerpt from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Chapter 9
A computer chatted to itself in alarm as it noticed an airlock open and close itself for no apparent reason.
This was because Reason was in fact out to lunch.
A hole had just appeared in the Galaxy. It was exactly a nothingth of a second long, a nothingth of
an inch wide, and quite a lot of million light years from end to end.
As it closed up lots of paper hats and party balloons fell out of it and drifted off through the universe. A team of seven three-foot-high market analysts fell out of it and died, partly of asphyxication, partly of surprise.
Two hundred and thirty-nine thousand lightly fried eggs fell out of it too, materializing in a large woobly heap on the famine-struck land of Poghril in the Pansel system.
The whole Poghril tribe had died out from famine except for one last man who died of cholesterol
poisoning some weeks later.
The nothingth of a second for which the hole existed reverberated backwards and forwards through time in a most improbable fashion. Somewhere in the deeply remote past it seriously traumatized a small random group of atoms drifting through the empty sterility of space and made them cling together in the most extraordinarily unlikely patterns. These patterns quickly learnt to copy themselves (this was part of what was so extraordinary of the patterns) and went on to cause massive trouble on every planet they drifted on to. That was how life began in the Universe.
Five wild Event Maelstroms swirled in vicious storms of unreason and spewed up a pavement.
On the pavement lay Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent gulping like half-spent fish.
.....
They both sat on the pavement and watched with a certain unease as huge children bounced heavily along the sand and wild horses thundered through the sky taking fresh supplies of reinforced railings to the Uncertain Areas.
"You know," said Arthur with a slight cough, "if this is Southend, there's something very odd about it..."
"You mean the way the sea stays steady and the buildings keep washing up and down?" said Ford.
"Yes I thought that was odd too. In fact," he continued as with a huge bang Southend split itself into six equal segments which danced and span giddily round each other in lewd and licentious formation, "there is something altogether very strange going on."
Wild yowling noises of pipes and strings seared through the wind, hot doughnuts popped out of the road for ten pence each, horrid fish stormed out of the sky and Arthur and Ford decided to make a run for it.
They plunged through heavy walls of sound, mountains of archaic thought, valleys of mood music, bad shoe sessions and footling bats and suddenly heard a girl's voice.
It sounded quite a sensible voice, but it just said, "Two to the power of one hundred thousand to one against and falling," and that was all.
Ford skidded down a beam of light and span round trying to find a source for the voice but could see nothing he could seriously believe in.
"What was that voice?" shouted Arthur.
"I don't know," yelled Ford, "I don't know. It sounded like a measurement of probability."
"Probability? What do you mean?"
"Probability. You know, like two to one, three to one, five to four against. It said two to the power of one hundred thousand to one against. That's pretty improbable you know."
A million-gallon vat of custard upended itself over them without warning.
"But what does it mean?" cried Arthur.
"What, the custard?"
"No, the measurement of probability!"
"I don't know. I don't know at all. I think we're on some kind of spaceship."
"I can only assume," said Arthur, "that this is not the first-class compartment."
Bulges appeared in the fabric of space-time. Great ugly bulges.
"Haaaauuurrgghhh ..." said Arthur as he felt his body softening and bending in unusual directions.
"Southend seems to be melting away ... the stars are swirling ... a dustbowl ... my legs are drifting off into the sunset ... my left arm's come off too." A frightening thought struck him: "Hell," he said, "how am I going to operate my digital watch now?" He wound his eyes desperately around in Ford's direction.
"Ford," he said, "you're turning into a penguin. Stop it."
Again came the voice.
"Two to the power of seventy-five thousand to one against and falling."
Ford waddled around his pond in a furious circle.
"Hey, who are you," he quacked. "Where are you? What's going on and is there any way of stopping it?"
"Please relax," said the voice pleasantly, like a stewardess in an airliner with only one wing and two engines, one of which is on fire, "you are perfectly safe."
"But that's not the point!" raged Ford. "The point is that I am now a perfectly save penguin, and my colleague here is rapidly running out of limbs!"
"It's alright, I've got them back now," said Arthur.
"Two to the power of fifty thousand to one against and falling," said the voice.
"Admittedly," said Arthur, "they're longer than I usually like them, but ..."
"Isn't there anything," squawked Ford in avian fury, "you feel you ought to be telling us?"
The voice cleared its throat. A giant petit four lolloped off into the distance.
"Welcome," the voice said, "to the Starship Heart of Gold."
The voice continued.
"Please do not be alarmed," it said, "by anything you see or hear around you. You are bound to feel some initial ill effects as you have been rescued from certain death at an improbability level of two to the power of two hundred and seventy-six thousand to one against - possibly much higher. We are now cruising at a level of two to the power of twenty-five thousand to one against and falling, and we will be restoring normality just as soon as we are sure what is normal anyway. Thank you. Two to the power of twenty thousand to one against and falling."
The voice cut out.
Ford and Arthur were in a small luminous pink cubicle.
Ford was wildly excited.
"Arthur!" he said, "this is fantastic! We've been picked up by a ship powered by the Infinite Improbability Drive! This is incredible! I heard rumors about it before! They were all officially denied, but they must have done it! They've built the Improbability Drive! Arthur, this is ... Arthur? What's happening?"
Arthur had jammed himself against the door to the cubicle, trying to hold it closed, but it was ill fitting.
Tiny furry little hands were squeezing themselves through the cracks, their fingers were inkstained; tiny voices chattered insanely.
Arthur looked up.
"Ford!" he said, "there's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've worked out."
Hahaha, indeed, I am a huge fan! His first three HGG books have a permanent spot on my "top shelf". Excellent fiction writing. I was reminded of him when I read John Dies at the End by David Wong. (Though DA takes the win in writing discipline.)
Ernest Hemingway because concision is king, and Raymond Chandler because noir slang is poetry.