Frank Hecker - Interests - Fiction Read

In general I don't read a lot of fiction (at least compared to nonfiction and poetry); however here are some works of fiction I had enjoyed reading at the time I last updated this page several years ago.

• Samuel Richardson, Pamela and Clarissa (only one-fifth of the way through the latter). Richardson is really an amazing figure and has significance well beyond the realm of literature; for an interesting discussion of this see G.J. Barker-Benfield's Culture of Sensibility.
• Almost all of Jane Austen's novels (rereading here, for everything except Sanditon and The Watsons). I also highly recommend Tony Tanner's Jane Austen, which is among the best Austen criticism I've ever read; it's an excellent corrective if you've seen some of the Austen-derived movies and think Tanner is very insightful regarding what Jane Austen was writing about.
• Nicola Griffith, Slow River. This and her first novel Ammonite were about the first new science fiction after a long period of absence; Ammonite is a competent first novel, while Slow River is truly excellent. Interestingly enough, I first found out about Griffith from a fan's Web page, which I happened to come across while doing a Web search for references to Joanna Russ, another of my favorite authors.
• Kim Stanley Robinson's "Mars Trilogy": Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars.

If I had to pick the fictional works that I remember most intensely, it would be the following (almost one per century, as it happens):

• John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi
• Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liasons Dangereuse (in P.W.K. Stone's English translation). (Several movies have been made based to some degree or other on this book, including most recently Cruel Intentions; it's well worth reading in the original.)
• Jane Austen, Mansfield Park and Persuasion
• Charlotte Brontë, Villette
• J.G. Ballard, Crash

I know, it's a pretty depressing lot overall, with many of them not really novels at all. I started out reading science fiction almost exclusively, and still have no real taste for mainstream 19th or 20th century novels, nor for most "postmodern" fiction (with some notable exceptions, like Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo).