Top Ten ALL TIME Favourite Authors

20:44 Cilla 8 Comments

Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted by The Broke and The Bookish. Click here for more information.

This is a seriously difficult list to compile! I don't think I can come up with ten names, but I'm going to try. Here we gooo:

1. J.K. Rowling. This is an obvious choice for me. Harry Potter was - is - so important to me in many ways. It is still my escape; the world is so familiar and yet so strange, and in a way the characters are alive to me. I enjoy Rowling's writing outside of Harry Potter too. Sure, The Casual Vacancy was a bit jarring at first, and she'll never write another like HP (how can anyone?), but she continues to write memorably strange and vivid characters and basically excellent stories.

2. Jodi Picoult. I buy everything she writes and have only been disappointed once. She never fails to tug on my heartstrings and make me really think about difficult, emotionally charged topics. Not to mention those complicated, beautifully flawed characters! Nineteen Minutes remain one of my favourite books of all time.

3. Meg Cabot. Honestly, the last time I read a Meg Cabot novel, it was really hard to remember why I loved her so much. I'm still putting her on this list, however, because I was so in love with The Mediator and The Princess Diaries, and still remember them fondly. I adored her ability to tap into the mind of a teenage girl, and that connection I felt with Mia Thermopolis and Suze Simon was important to me during my probably-less-thrilling-than-theirs-but-equally-complicated teenage years.

4. Enid Blyton. She was the author that pretty much started it all for me. From the moment my mother gave me her copies of Famous Five and Secret Seven, her books set my imagination free.

5. Cameron Dokey. I forgot how much I loved reading her writing until I was going through my list of favourite books. Her book, How Not to Spend Your Senior Year, was probably the first YA I read, far before I knew what YA was, and I was so in love with it I went on to read her retelling of fairytales. I loved the twists she placed on those stories.

6. Marissa Meyer. A part of me feels that it may be premature to put her on this list when I've only started reading her last year, but that's hardly a measure of the quality of her writing. Her world-building is amazing and her characters are complex. The Lunar Chronicles is the first series that comes even close to Harry Potter for me in terms of how much I loved it, so that's saying a lot.

7. L.M. Montgomery. Anne of Green Gables and Emily of New Moon were the series my mother and I bonded over when I was a little older, so it is extra special to me. We loved Avonlea, and Anne Shirley, and Gilbert Blythe - basically all of it. This is a series I need to re-read, because it has been far too long since I last go through them.

I honestly can't think of anyone else right now, so this list will just have to be a Top Seven this week!